ATLSECCON 2025

Our personas are fabrications and constructions of our inner self that we project outwards.  We do this through various means and influences such as race, gender, sex, ability, age, culture, religion, norms,  class, and status. For the “real world” aka “irl” we do all this by expression in our clothing, makeup, hairstyling, our hobbies, our network of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. We leverage all of these facets and we create masks, personas, that we think will best interact with the world around us. The same concepts apply when creating personas for infiltrating online communities. 

Online communities are built on trust, reputation, and currency which can take various forms such as data, crypto, intel and notoriety. This talk is an exploration of techniques; linguistics, OPSEC, OSINT, and SOCENG. Tactical operations and concepts like hours of online operation, timezone shifting, and using low ranking accounts as canon fodder for probing, and psychological models used in the infiltration of emerging threat actor groups.