About Alex

Alex Kasper (born Alexis Kasperavičius) is a deception researcher applying the manipulation techniques he developed with Kevin Mitnick to artificial intelligence, both to break these systems and to detect the same attacks. He describes the framework in his forthcoming book, Manufactured Urgency: Craft of the Bad-Faith Actor.

A former hacker featured in Mitnick’s memoir Ghost in the Wires, Kasper ran as a teenager in the same Los Angeles phone-phreak and hacker circle. The group broke into phone, cellular, and commercial networks purely out of curiosity, enjoyed unfettered access to the systems they targeted, and even turned their skills on the security researchers hunting them. Kasper was never arrested.

In 1999 he co-founded Nexspace, an early coworking space where the newly released Mitnick, then barred from touching a computer, wrote The Art of Deception, with Kasper handling the work Mitnick was legally forbidden to do. In 2002 the two founded Defensive Thinking and built CSEPS, the world’s first social-engineering prevention certification, training clients that ranged from corporations and banks to the U.S. Air Force and Marines.

Previously, Kasper produced the award-winning 3DO video game Return Fire and the USC short film Eyeball Eddie (Martin Starr’s first lead role). On the Miramax Mitnick biopic Takedown he talked his way onto the production, befriended the producers, and secured script changes for a more sympathetic portrayal of his friend, social-engineering the film about a social engineer.

He spent the past two decades as a tech executive building trading and document authentication systems across the legal and food industries in Los Angeles, Miami, and Berlin, and is now based in Montreal.

A lifelong classical French horn player, Kasper continues to perform with orchestras and chamber groups.

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