Slightly tangentially, I haven't read anything by Kevin Mitnick for 20 years, but his whole thing on social engineering feels related to putting together innocu

Slightly tangentially, I haven't read anything by Kevin Mitnick for 20 years, but his whole thing on social engineering feels related to putting together innocuous bits of information that add up to more than the sum of their parts. I have been at several companies where their competitive advantage was something extremely simple and basic that their competitors could do, but just hadn't twigged. For example, in the pub one night, there were a couple of friendly competitors and one was complaining that they had the same machines but couldn't get the same output we did. My mate nearly blurted out that, "well, we just use the standard recommended XXX" but his boss gave him a kick just before he did. The competitors were simply cutting costs by not using the standard recommended XXX and that was literally the only thing that borked their quality, and yet they hadn't picked up on it. The point is, the stuff that seems without value to you may be of incredible value to others. We have stated this time and time again on HN when it comes to privacy and data protection and yet I still need to see stuff like GHunt to remind me. It's fun and scary to see how little tidbits of information are both easily available and easily linked. Assuming it works.