2024-11-23 –, Ngaio Marsh Theatre
At 1851’s Great Exhibition, locksmiths offered prizes to anyone who could defeat their so-called “unpickable” locks. This hugely successful marketing stunt heralded the modern security industry, with vendors stoking fears of Sophisticated Hackers™ to create demand for expensive high-tech security solutions, while daring safe-breakers kept finding ways to thwart even the most impenetrable so-called “burglar proof” safe.
In this talk we’ll meet some notorious characters from this now-forgotten golden age of safecracking. We’ll take a look at their criminal exploits, and how safecrackers’ methods and security countermeasures evolved over a century.
This talk is a whimsical yarn based on historical research I've been doing over the last few years on NZ safecrackers. It gives case studies of a few infamous NZ safecrackers, covering their origins and how they became highly technically specialised professional criminals, the exploits that made them notorious in their day, and their eventual downfall. It briefly examines the techniques used in safecracking and how they changed over time, as well as changes in safe/strongroom technology (some addressing actual emerging threats, others driven by industry FUD and planned obsolescence). This talk is not meant to be a lesson on what history can teach us about how to improve corporate cybersecurity (boring, anachronistic, big LinkedIn energy), but it will ✨subtly✨ nod at some timeless wisdom and obvious parallels to modern-day hackers and security.
Petra has a point and she's getting to it. A reformed consultant, Petra now helps small businesses to transform their information security programmes. She keeps talking about writing a book about NZ safecrackers one day but probably won't get round to it.