It looks like Richard beat me to it. I also recently watched the first two episodes of CourtTV‘s, now TruTV’s, Tiger Team series and I can honestly say that I enjoyed it. It’s rare to find a show that is educational, entertaining, and not over the top when it comes to showing how the technology is used (think of the movie Hackers – when was the last time you flew through the internet and attacked the kernel?).

In case you’re unfamiliar with the Tiger Team premise, Wikipedia has a very good description:

The show follows a “tiger team” of Chris Nickerson, Luke McOmie, and Ryan Jones, which is hired to infiltrate organizations with the objective of testing their weaknesses to electronic, psychological, tactical, and physical threats. Attacks executed on organizations in this television show include social engineering, wired and wireless hacking, and physically breaking into buildings.

One highlight that I’d like to mention is how easy it was for the team to clone their targets RFID pass by simply walking up to him on the street with a relatively small piece of hardware (S01E02: 24 Karat Caper). I’ll be honest, this scared the hell out of me. The best part of the episode came from the target during the debriefing phase. He learned how a simple sleeve for his card could have avoided the cloning attack. Noticeably agitated he asked something like “You mean this could be solved by a $20 piece of plastic?” (paraphrasing because I don’t remember the exact words).

See…sometimes it’s the simple things that make the difference 🙂

I, like Richard, was upset to learn that TruTV was not going to continue with the show. In fact, a quick search on the TruTV website returns no results. Hopefully they reconsider and bring the show back. I think it’s a great educational tool for businesses.