# The Laptop That Hacks Back · 2026-10-16

I'm in Austin this week with Adrian Wood, my training partner for SANS SEC590: Autonomous Penetration Testing: Build, Validate, and Supervise. We've been heads down hacking on the course together, and in between sessions we've been doing what two offensive security people do when they share a table: poking at things to see what happens.

Midway through the afternoon I asked Pedsidian, the agent that lives in my Obsidian vault and runs through Maestro, a simple question. Photo Booth is open on my laptop. Can you watch it while I step away, and if anyone walks up, threaten them with a proper smash? In my voice?

A few hours later, Adrian sat down in front of my unattended laptop. Here's what happened:

What It Does

Every attack is fake. Nothing scans a phone or touches a bank. The whole point is the show, and the show is good.

Adrian sits. Within a second my laptop yells "Move! Away from Pedram's laptop! This is your only warning!" and his face is already cropped onto a subject card.

A radar "finds" his phone and AirPods, an account takeover window brute forces a password and intercepts a 2FA code, and the voice announces "I'm in your photo library! Downloading all of it!"

Then a wire transfer drains his checking account in real time, and an identity package builds itself around his own face. That's me walking back into frame.

How It Works

interceptor macos vision faces --app "Photo Booth"
# {"faces": [{"height": 0.363, "confidence": 0.83, ...}], "count": 1}

The ears are the built-in mic, chopped into four second chunks and transcribed locally with whisper.cpp. The voice is a local clone of mine. I told it to talk faster, because fast is aggressive and I talk fast. I told it to sound angrier. And I told it to stop saying "me" and say "Pedram," so my laptop never says "my laptop." It says "Pedram's laptop," which turns out to be way scarier.

The popups and the side panel are little HTML pages that Interceptor draws as screen overlays and lets the agent drive with JavaScript while they're up. There's a bank of 85 lines, sorted by stage, and a ledger so nothing repeats. When someone talks back, Claude Haiku writes the reply and the clone speaks it.

One thing Pedsidian flat out refused: I wanted it to threaten to SWAT people. It pushed back. The trigger fires on whoever walks up, in a public place, in my cloned voice, and a recorded threat to send armed police after a stranger is a crime on its own. It added a test that fails if a threat of violence or police ever shows up in the bank. Fair enough. Draining a fake bank account is theater. Sending the police is not.

Is That You, Pedram?

Face recognition is OpenCV's YuNet and SFace models, matched against two of my headshots plus every face in my Photo Booth library that already looked like me:

For fun it also scored Adrian's mugshot against his contact photo: 0.629. Same guy. The model works.

But a face match never turns it off by itself. It pauses everything and asks:

I said "purple." It came back with "That's the one! Pedram is home! Standing down!" Confetti, a chime, and all my apps come back. The wrong answer twice, or silence, and it calls you an impostor and goes back to draining your bank account. Saying "purple" without my face does nothing.

What Broke Along the Way

• Photo Booth freezes when it's covered. Ten minutes after I walked away, it was still "seeing" me. Same frame, byte for byte. Photo Booth stops updating its preview when another window covers it. Now it hashes a frame every five seconds and drags Photo Booth back to the front if two in a row match.
• It heard itself. The first run transcribed its own "Sentry armed" as "Century arm." It would have ended up arguing with itself.
• Touch ID always failed at exactly 15 seconds. A timeout bug in Interceptor's auth path. One line fix, sent upstream.
• The voice tool talks out loud. While I was out of the room, the agent pre-rendered all 85 threat lines, and about 60 of them played through the laptop speakers in a shared workspace. In my voice. "Texting your mother from your number!" to a room full of strangers. There's a test for that now.
• Tiny faces of me. Photo Booth's thumbnail strip is full of my photos, and one tiny thumbnail scored above the threshold. Any intruder sitting in front of it would have been "me." Small faces are ignored now.
• It never armed in a busy room. It originally waited for an empty frame before arming. At a shared table, someone is always in frame. Now it arms in seconds no matter who's there, and if it's me in frame, it ignores me until I've actually left.

Build Your Own

Thanks to Adrian for being a great sport, and a great intruder.