How My High School Creative Writing Class Prepared Me for Social Engineering

In this engaging presentation hosted in the DEF CON 30 virtual altspace, the speaker illustrates how principles learned in high school creative writing classes directly translate into advanced tradecraft for social engineering and tabletop exercise facilitation.

[10:39] The speaker explores the core literary elements of storytelling—genre, setting, character backstory, and dialogue tone—demonstrating how social engineers use these exact concepts to craft convincing pretexts and realistic personas. She explains that effective social engineering relies on establishing believable narratives that resonate with a target's expectations, emotional triggers, and organizational reality.

[21:21] The talk expands on applying creative writing to incident response tabletop simulations. The speaker explains how scenario design, narrative pacing, escalating conflict, and multi-threaded plot twists [31:55] transform boring compliance exercises into immersive, high-stakes simulations that genuinely test an organization's crisis decision-making. She concludes with practical advice on debriefing participants [43:06], using detailed observational notes to provide actionable feedback and strengthen organizational resilience.

(AI summary — Gemini Flash)