Attacking Santa’s Christmas deliveries

In this fun and festive episode of You Gotta Hack That, Felix and Alex joke about how they could stop Christmas from coming. The whole episode pretends to be a fly-on-the-wall account of a cyber attack planning meeting. A tricky client, who turns out to be the Grinch, has asked them to find ways to secretly disrupt Santa’s supply chain and deliveries.

Felix and Alex get creative, starting with Santa’s workshop’s operational technology (OT). The cunning duo suggests that it may be possible to break toy production by messing up the Elves’ instructions so toy parts don’t fit together. This would slow down the whole production process without anyone knowing how it had happened.

Next, they talk about Santa’s delivery system. By mixing up address lists and coordinates, they could cause Santa to miss chimneys or have to go back to old-fashioned navigation, which would take a lot more time. Felix adds that they could make Santa’s sleigh less reliable by sending false safety alerts. If Santa and his team didn’t trust the sleigh’s systems, it would delay the deliveries even more.

The plan gets even wilder when they start talking about the magic reins that control the reindeer and Rudolph’s red nose. Felix explains that the red nose works like a GPS sensor or guidance tool. If they could mess with its software, they could cause Santa to go off-course. Small glitches or bugs could make Rudolph steer the sleigh in the wrong direction.

To make things worse, Felix and Alex think about using social engineering. They could distract important elves, like the Chief Elf, by giving them IT problems at home. This would pull them away from their jobs at the North Pole. They also joke about stopping food deliveries for the reindeer, which would hurt morale and slow everything down even more.

The two also come up with bigger distractions to keep people from noticing Christmas is failing. They joke about making something huge happen in the news, like a prime minister quitting on Christmas Eve. However, they decide that their smaller, sneaky disruptions should be enough to cause chaos.

As they wrap up, Felix and Alex talk about how they would know if their plan worked. If their names didn’t show up on Santa’s naughty list, they would know their sabotage was a success. They suggests hacking the list’s website so they could change their status just to be sure.

With their silly plan complete, the hosts laugh and say goodbye to their listeners. They remind everyone that, while this story is fictional, it does reflect real challenges in keeping things like technology and supply chains secure. It’s all in good fun, but there’s always a little truth behind the jokes!