Most security awareness training keeps people in the role of prey: memorize red flags, stay vigilant, and hope your System 2 brain has enough calories left when the real attack arrives. Wolfmasking is supervised deceptive roleplay: everyday defenders safely rehearse the attacker’s moves, develop a mental model of the predator, then return to defense with better instincts. This talk presents lessons and examples from a field pilot tested at Clemson University with support from CISO John Hoyt, in which roughly 80 nursing freshmen learned to construct benign social-engineering challenges, compete against one another, and report each other’s attempts. The point was not to create attackers, but to create an identity shift: Students began shifting from hypothetical victims into former players: people who recognize pretext, authority, urgency, trust transfer, and emotional pressure not because they were “staying vigilant,” but because they have practiced those moves themselves I will share the four-lesson structure, guardrails, incentives, surprises, failures, and why “practice being fooled” may matter less than “practice doing the fooling safely.” I’ll use a quick magic example to show the gap between hypothetical knowledge and lived deceptive experience. This is not a product pitch. It is a field report on a new training pedagogy for social engineering resilience.

Brian Brushwood

Brian Brushwood has spent 25 years teaching millions of people how deception works: first as a touring magician, then as creator/host of Scam School / Scam Nation, host of National Geographic’s Hacking the System, creator of The Modern Rogue, and host of World’s Greatest Con. His work focuses on scams, magic, persuasion, social engineering, and the mechanics of trust: how it is built, exploited, defended, and rehearsed. Through Scam School and Scam Nation, Brian spent nearly two decades turning ordinary non-deceivers into capable ethical deceivers, helping them understand cons and persuasion from the inside. Brian has delivered keynotes to audiences of thousands and recently developed an experimental offense-to-defense social engineering curriculum, piloted at Clemson University with CISO John Hoyt.