The notices have been sent. The passwords have been updated. But in the wake of the 2025 incidents targeting Columbia, Dartmouth, Princeton, UPenn, and Harvard, a quiet risk remains for our entire academic community. While our systems may now be secure, the "Second Wave" of challenges is just beginning—and it won't target our technology; it will target our relationships.
Recent events at our peer institutions have revealed a calculated shift. Bad actors are moving beyond just stealing passwords; they are specifically seeking out "event attendance," "donation history," and "biographical data". Why? Because in the age of AI, this shared history provides the raw material to manufacture Weaponized Trust.
Join Ben Syn, Director of University and Career Education at KnowBe4, for a joint Harvard-Yale briefing that decodes this new reality. Whether you are in New Haven or Cambridge, we will explore how criminals use the "who, where, and when" of our campus lives to craft highly convincing phone calls and messages that slip past our natural defenses.
Combining deep security expertise with a background in the humanities, this session will cover:
- The Strategy: Why personal details (like reunion attendance or recent gifts) are now used to build immediate authority and false credibility with faculty and staff.
- The "Second Wave": How to spot the follow-up attempts—especially AI-enhanced phone calls—that use this stolen history to mimic colleagues or university leaders.
- Practical Defense: Simple, human-centric steps everyone can take to verify a caller’s identity, spot the "linguistic tells" of a scam, and protect our community’s culture of openness.
The incidents of 2025 gave them a script. Now, we must learn how to spot the acting and protect ourselves against the deception that follows.
Speaker Bio: Ben Syn is the Director of University and Career Education at KnowBe4, where he leads the security awareness strategy for over one million students across 200+ academic institutions globally. Operating at the intersection of cybersecurity and the humanities, Ben brings a unique dual lens to the defense of higher education. As a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) with a Master’s in English, Ben creates a bridge between the digital and the human. He spent over a decade as a university Senior Instructor, specializing in the mechanics of persuasion and influence. Today, he applies that deep understanding of language to decode the "linguistic tells" of modern social engineering. His work moves beyond standard compliance, focusing instead on equipping the academic community—from incoming freshmen to alumni—with the cognitive tools to navigate an era of AI-driven deception. Ben champions the idea that in the face of sophisticated algorithms, our strongest firewall remains critical thinking.