Welcome to Syntax. Today we have Matt Brown on. He is a YouTuber and security consultant who specializes in pen testing IoT hardware. He has a YouTube channel that's filled with fascinating videos. So, for example, he found dozens of unsecured police license plate cameras. And they had a video feed. It had a stream of all of the data, which included the license plates, the car make and model and the GPS coordinates.

These acted smart grill and extracted the firmware from that. And he dove into the network activity of dozens of cheap Chinese cameras.

And recently he let Claude rip on one of them, which was really interesting.

So we've had them on today to talk about all of this hardware hacking

stuff works, the legality of it, and hopefully a few interesting stories. Welcome, Matt. Thanks for

coming on. Thank you for having me. Yeah. So I've been watching your YouTube channel for,

I don't know, probably for about a year now. I'm not sure how I stumbled upon it, but you have these

really good breakdowns of how you can take a piece of hardware and then just dig into how it works or find some pieces of interesting pieces that you may not necessarily know.

Or buying something that's from like a different industry, like the police license plate readers.

And then you could just buy one yourself and then just dig into it

and you find all the API endpoints and then you realize,

oh, this is maybe not as secure as we thought it would be.

So how do you even get into all of this stuff?

That's a great question.

I guess the chief kind of hacker mentality of curiosity and letting that lead you in the discovery of information and knowledge has always been a thing

that I've done since my youth. So, you know, back in my high school and college days,

you know, messing around with computers at my school, things like that. I've always been

interested in going to thrift stores back when I was in high school. I would go to Goodwill,

which is a U.S.-based thrift store. I don't know if they have them outside the United States.

Yeah, we have them in Canada.

Oh, sweet.

So I would just go buy used electronics and take them apart

...