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S1x5: eps_1.4_3xpl0its.wmv

Episode Description: “<mr.rob0t> fsociety arrives @ steel mountain – most secure data facility in USA. elliot needs to get in and get out-wuz he pwned?”

Cloning Steel Mountain Employee Badge

Mr.Robot bumps into a Steel Mountain employee and clones his badge with an RFID reader inside his bag while walking up to leave a tip at the counter in a coffee shop.

The hardware device used to duplicate the badge’s info on a blank card. There are a number of devices that can pull this off nowadays, whether you use a Flipper Zero or any other RFID signal cloning device. MITRE’s got a great brief description of it here and Safe and Sound Security provides a more thorough description of it here.

Breaking Poor Bill Harper and Trudy Davis

Mr.Robot and the team have cobbled together a broad psychological profile of Bill using his company contact page, LinkedIn, and Instagram profiles (replaced with generic nameless versions in the show).

Bill’s staff page on the Steel Mountain site shows that he’s a high performer in the three years he’s been there. His LinkedIn shows that his Steel Mountain job is the best job he’s ever had in years so he’s probably very eager to perform well. And Bill’s Instagram only shows selfies or pictures with his cats, so it can be assumed that he’s single and doesn’t have many friends.

The fsociety crew uses this to their advantage by having Mobley use his “trusted contributor” status on Wikipedia to create a fake profile of a tech billionaire named Sam Sepiol for Elliot to assume as a persona. Using the pressure of this big name to intimidate Bill, who doesn’t want to cause any problems at work, Elliot gets an impromptu tour with no appointment and later denigrates Bill in order to have him summon his supervisor to take Elliot to level 2.

Elliot states that Bill’s the perfect exploit because he’s “desperate enough for the business to break protocol and let me in. Lonely enough to break.”

It’s an incredibly mean scene of Elliot hounding Bill about how no one will truly mourn him when he dies and attacking his self-esteem by reiterating how insignificant he must be. It’s a great advertisement for keeping as many of your social media accounts private as possible. Knowledge is power, and the Internet can be a very cruel place. Don’t give people ammunition to hurt you with. Things like your appearance, relationship status, employment and implied earnings, family situation, and more will be weaponized often for someone else’s amusement.

The original plan the crew has is to use Bill’s supervisor Wendy to get above Level 1 of the facility to Level 2 where their target is. They plan to send her a fake message stating that her girlfriend’s in labor to force her to immediately leave the facility with Elliot free to roam the area. Unfortunately they miss that the baby’s already been delivered, so Wendy is off that day and they get Trudy instead who’s far more skeptical and suspicious of Elliot.

Unable to find any obvious exploitable info on Trudy, they turn to using her husband’s cell phone number and spoofing it using the Social Engineering Toolkit to send her an ominous text implying that he’s had some sort of health emergency.

This leaves Trudy shocked and disoriented, rushing off to her office and leaving Elliot to have reception see him out.

This is an even crueler trick than what they pulled off with Bill, specifically done by Mobley. Trudy and her husband have been married for 30 years. Their mortgage is paid off meaning they both seem to have stable well paying jobs and you can assume their marriage is pretty strong.

If you add a race element to this, and I assume Mobley did, it’s statistically probable that Trudy’s husband has some genetic predisposition towards one or more of the following: high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, cancer, or sickle cell disease.

TL;DR: Mobley’s a real piece of shit for this.

After pulling off this miserable act of social engineering, Elliot learns that the elevator can only be operated by people with the right approval, so he goes looking for a stairwell and picks the door lock.

Lockpicking’s got a long history of being associated with hacking, whether it’s as a physical penetration test or just a hobby hackers like to get into. Most information security conferences have a lockpicking village you can learn from.

This doesn’t work since it only leads to a parking garage, but luckily Elliot runs into Tyrell Wellick who invites him to have lunch at the Executive Lounge which is near their target. Elliot excuses himself to go to the restroom and in there is what seems to be a utility or maintenance closet with the thermostat in it. A bit of a stretch but sure.

With some quick disassembly of the original red ethernet cable’s wires, plugging them into the Pi’s PCB in a separate green ethernet cable, using electrical tape to seal any exposed wiring, and reattaching the thermostat to the wall, Elliot plants their “asymmetric backdoor” and leaves without anyone knowing.

The fsociety crew pulls off an alarmingly simple compromise of a secure facility. Unfortunately, Darlene later learns after checking in with “The Dark Army” (cringe) that they’re backing out. Darlene protests, and she gets kicked out of their IRC channel which is kind of hilarious.

Darlene, being the grungy crash out she is, goes to the day job of her Dark Army contact/fake struggle rapper and throws a tantrum knocking over a bunch of books after loudly complaining about the botched operation. He points out how stupid this is and she leaves in a huff.

Later back at the fsociety lair, Darlene connects to the Steel Mountain network herself using their backdoor and threatens to run their malware herself. Without The Dark Army’s help, Mr.Robot implies it won’t be as effective and Steel Mountain will just recover and strengthen security even more. He pleads with her to leave things alone and Elliot talks her down. Smart move on his part.

In conclusion, I really enjoyed episodes 3 and 4. As someone who’s been working in, and learning about, cybersecurity for almost a decade now it’s really cool to see these attacks I’ve only ever read about or seen in proof of concept presentations or papers applied to fiction. These two episodes have had the most impressive hacks so far, and if things escalate throughout the next three seasons this will easily be one of my favorite shows ever.