social engineering

It's also probably the most common type of breach. It's way easier to compromise tech support than find a vulnerability, so it makes a ton of sense for a company like Blizzard to have an auditing team to test the various attack vectors.

A lot of roles like QA and cyber security sound glamorous, but that's because people like glamorous titles. If you've spent even a tiny amount of time working in a relevant industry (in this case, anything touching computers), you should be able to read between the lines. That "sanitation engineer" is probably just a janitor or garbage truck driver, not the person in charge of the city water filtration services or something.

scavenger hunt badge

I haven't been, but yeah, that sounds likely. Things like that are to get people new to the industry excited, not to actually challenge hardcore hackers.

I've attended and even spoken at some tech conferences, and they're like 90% entry level stuff with a handful of interesting events and talks that actually break some new ground. I'm in senior level position now, and conferences are something I'd send my juniors to for networking and to get an idea of how they want to grow their career, but I don't really attend anymore. I imagine cyber security conferences are similar.

Ask him what SYN, SYN-ACK and ACK are

Lol, that's basic TCP stack stuff, I doubt he would've gone that low level at a company like Blizzard. You get to that level when you're looking for amplification attacks at a place like Cloudflare or the military.

At Blizzard, they most likely want to make sure they're up to date on security patches, their tech support is following the proper scripts, and IT isn't getting lazy reviewing reports and whatnot. Basically, liability coverage in case there's a real breach so their insurance can cover any losses.

But yeah, streamers like to appear like they know their stuff because that's what gets people to watch.