DEF CON 23 - Chris Rock - I Will Kill You
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN repeatedly recommends it whenever fake deaths, identity verification or records fraud come up, praising how easy the attack seemed.
What it is
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.
Recommended by 7 HN commenters across 6 different months, 2016 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends jastanton · 2016-09 · on “Faking your death”
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: [this video]
Recommends griffinmahon · 2016-09 · on “How to Overthrow a Government [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: [this video] .
Recommends Maarten88 · 2018-06 · on “Facebook ordered to explain deleted profile”
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: [this 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.
Recommends molesy · 2019-02 · on “$190M missing after crypto exchange Quadriga CEO dies”
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 - [this video]
Recommends chatmasta · 2019-11 · on “It's Way Too Easy to Get a .gov Domain Name”
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: [this video]
Recommends TheDong · 2020-11 · on “What to do if the bank says you're dead”
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" [this video]
Recommends unforgivenpasta · 2023-12 · on “Verizon fell for fake "search warrant," gave victim's phone data to stalker”
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) [this video]
Cites freeflight · 2017-09 · on “Three Years in Identity Theft Hell”
> 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: [this video]