DEF CON 23 - Chris Rock - I Will Kill You
DEFCONConference7 HN recommenders · 2016–2025
269K views · talk · evergreen · Uploaded 2015-08-14
A DEF CON 23 talk showing how weak controls in electronic death registration systems let someone virtually kill a person and obtain a real death certificate, with consequences for their identity and life.
HN repeatedly recommends it whenever fake deaths, identity verification or records fraud come up, praising how easy the attack seemed.
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10 comments from Hacker News
Reminds me of a DefCon speaker that talked about exploiting a bunch of websites to order death and birth certificates. Really eye opening, and potentially devastating if it's done to you. Edit: [VIDEO]
The speaker's previous presentation at a different year of the same conference, about using online records to fabricate your own death or the birth of a made-up baby, is also worth watching: [VIDEO] .
> The United States. I assure you that even though other countries have credit reporting, they do not use SSNs. They use ID cards with at least some features to make forging said ID cards more difficult, unlike the US SSN which is pretty much just a number on a piece of paper. This is mainly an issue of authentification and as long as your credentials remain crappy/easy to guess/easy to forge (like the US SSN system), that long it will stay easy to game the system. Imho this def con talk about birthing and killing virtual babies might also be quite relevant to the issue, tho it's not entirely focused on the US: [VIDEO]
It's not only Facebook who have this process unsufficiently secured. The process for administering real death is also not really tamperproof. There is a hilarious defcon presentation on virtually killing someone and getting a real death certificate: [VIDEO] Improperly reporting someone dead, or misrepresenting someone's will is something "you don't do" so the system is designed to minimize friction/pain.
Most jurisdictions (US and otherwise) have moved to Electronic Death Registration Systems. There was a fun Defcon talk about "killing" people with them a few years ago - [VIDEO]
An alarming amount of societal functionality depends on what effectively amounts to the honor system. This is especially true when it comes to any sort of gatekept specialty profession, like coroners for example. There was a great talk at DefCon about faking death: [VIDEO]
On the subject of people being declared dead, there's a good defcon talk about abusing how easy it is to declare someone dead. "Chris Rock - I Will Kill You" [VIDEO]
This reminds me of a Defcon talk.[0] In Australia before a certain date the states/feds didn't keep a record of your face if you got a licence/proof of age card. If you find yourself in this position all that is required is non photo id and a statutory declaration signed by friend to authenticate your identity. [0] [VIDEO]
It is! This video is a bit old now but it's still so unbelievable how easy it was for the speaker to "kill" people (in Australia) [VIDEO]
Yeah, and Facebook is the least of your concerns. Defcon talk about the security of death certificates, and what happens to your life if you are targeted by this attack. [VIDEO]