Hacker Perspective: Rotted Mood
When I was young, I thought that I was worthless. A product of the religious south brought up in a time that unless you were "normal," tolerance and kindness weren't words that applied to you. Even in the late-1980s and early-1990s when "fag" was still a word thrown around in the same way as "retarded," I wouldn't have used those words. You see, when you're consistently called a "fat retarded faggot" over and over by a person driving a Camaro and sporting a mullet, you understand how those words cut. Am I gay? No. Was I overweight? Absolutely. Was or am I mentally challenged? Well, it turns out I do have a learning disorder. So, it is no surprise that as I grew up, I was an introverted and constantly depressed kid. Pantera, Metallica, and Slayer tapes my only friends. Until I discovered hacking.
One day my father, a system engineer, told me he wanted to show me something we could do with the computer other than just play games. He grabbed a box, plugged it into the phone jack, and plugged another wire into our computer. He opened some program and I started hearing strange sounds. And then some text appeared on the screen. My dad was introducing me to the world of dial-up bulletin board systems. I was maybe 10 or 11, but I was hooked. He told me about creating handles and showed me the message boards and the text-based online games he was playing with others at the time. He showed me a world where my physical traits didn't matter - a world where my utter lack of self-confidence didn't matter, where I could define who I wanted to be.
I was hooked. I spent many days and weekend nights on different BBS systems around my area of the country. For a completely backwards state that felt 30 years behind others, I was surprised we had so many to choose from. I found other metal heads in the area and started to tape trade with them. I had found a world where people were into the same stuff as me, and besides the one or two random people here and there, they weren't out to call me names, kick the shit out of me, or verbally batter me for not being able to keep up in math class. They were just interested in this person who knew that Reign in Blood was the start of something new in the metal world, or who could talk about Doctor Who.
You see, I lucked out. My father was a bit ahead of his time. A high school graduate who understood computers was going to be the real wave of the future. A father who introduced me to science fiction, Monty Python, and Pink Floyd at an early age. He showed me there were other ways to think about things. He taught me how to tear apart computers and put them back together by the time I was 11 or 12. He taught me that it was okay to just use these machines for what they were, but impressed in me that it was better to understand how they worked. To question everything about them. To question everything, period. This was good because, unknown to all of us at the time, he would only be alive a few more years.
When my father suddenly died a few years later, it sunk me. I retreated more to my room where I now had my own computer and spent hours on the dial-up systems every day. So much so that, like many of us in that time, my mother got fed up and got me my own phone line so she could have a phone again. A lonely kid who had just lost his only friend at the time, I became very active on the message boards just looking for anyone to talk to. And then someone suggested I start my own. So I found a copy of the Renegade BBS system and fired it up. This is when I really started to meet people in my area. As I was more into underground metal and punk by this time, as well as industrial and other dark forms of music and art, I attracted a more diverse group to my board than others I had been seeing at the time. Someone uploaded The Anarchist Cookbook and some of the current Cult of the Dead Cow text files, and right there is when the door was unlocked for me. My board was populated by local hackers and I hadn't even realized it. But instead of being the definition of assholes, as some at the time (and still today) would have led you to believe, they were the kindest people. Their politics matched mine. They had a level of tolerance for differences you didn't see at the time. I had found my tribe.
Soon, I would be attending Friday night 2600 meetings. I would be shown how to build a Red Box and would carry one around with me at all times. In later years being on tour with my band, this Red Box would come in extremely handy. I was also getting into the local punk scene and noticing so many similarities amongst the two. I was at the heaviest I had ever been in my life, hitting 300 pounds. But no one was calling me fat. No one was calling me faggot or shoving me around because I had S&M collars and bracelets on. There was one near run-in with a truck full of hillbillies, but instead of being alone in my car wondering what the hell I was going to do, my car was full of people who weren't going to take shit from them and would mess with them back.
At the same time as all of this, I was also playing music. There came a point where the Internet started to become more popular and overtake the BBS systems, and I decided to shut mine down and make a run at trying to be a professional musician. While I was still an introvert, talking to people on BBS message boards gave me somewhat of an understanding of how to talk to people, so I could at least find others with the same passions as mine and build relationships. By the time I reached college, I did one semester and had a teacher who told me I should quit because I was too stupid to understand basic math. I took her up on that suggestion and dropped out. I quit my job at AOL and dove into music full time.
Fast-forward 20 years. Time passed by and I never fully returned to the world of hackers and phreakers. I kept up with some of it here and there, like when Mitnick went to jail, but for the most part I wasn't present. To be honest, I lacked the skills and abilities to really hack or build anything. I had so many problems with math, and reading was also hard for me. I just thought I was stupid like everyone had suggested. It would take me many years to understand that I wasn't just stupid, but I had a legitimate learning disability that was keeping me from really learning and retaining information.
Today I work for a large company and recently found myself in Mumbai for a few weeks. For the first time in all my travels, jet lag had really hit me hard and I was sick pretty much my entire visit to Mumbai. I had recently found an interest in penetration testing and I was spending a lot of time in bed reading or surfing the Internet, specifically about the subject. In between violent trips to the bathroom, I wondered if 2600 was still in print, and much to my surprise I saw it was, so I subscribed, eager to re-read the magazine I often carried with me to school. My first issue came and I read it cover to cover on a flight, happy to see that nothing had really changed in the attitude of the magazine. Or in hackers in general.
At my job, I hear the term "hacker," "attacker," and "APT" thrown around interchangeably. I recently returned to school (against my better judgment) and, in one of my classes, a hacker was simply defined as a "criminal." "Hacker" has become a word like "drugs" in America. Depending on who is saying it, it could be a sin or a savior. It is used to demonize one group of people, while praising another. Recently, I was flying back from Portland. I was in the middle seat, which was a bummer. I fly a lot and I know how people tend to instantly forget their manners when an airplane is involved. I thought I would spent five hours not getting an arm rest because obviously the people sitting on either side of me needed both of theirs. "Whatever," I thought, and I pulled the Autumn issue of 2600 out and started to read it. The guy next to me audibly scoffed as I saw him looking at the front cover to see what I was reading. For most of the flight, I was stared at as if I was a terrorist threat. Anytime I pulled out my computer, phone, or highlighter to mark something in the magazine, I felt two sets of eyes watching me as if I was going to crash the plane. To both of my seat mates, "hacker" was just a dirty word. A word used to scare them into a specific pattern of thought. To them, I was just another one of "those" people, one who probably thinks they are better than others, smarter than others, and who takes advantage of people or does nothing but break the law.
But this is far from the truth. I haven't hacked into anything large. The last time I hacked into anything was the late-1990s. That was just the local university so I could use a Linux system to learn more about it. It didn't hurt that along with that hack came free Internet, as I was too poor to be able to afford Internet at the time. But I only achieved these hacks because people had no common sense when it came to passwords, such as knowing what a strong password was. But I have never really done anything that would have been considered "l33t," or whatever stupid slang was being thrown around at the time. I don't think I am better than anyone else; in fact, those feelings of worthlessness I had as a child follow me everywhere still today. After 20 years away from all things hacking, I struggle with the boxes on VulnHub, or Hack The Box. However, while these two people sitting on both sides of me on the flight made me feel small about myself, people inside the hacking community never have. And to me, that is the key point about hacking that people don't understand. Community.
In my local BBS scene, no one cared that I was overweight. No one ever cared what gender I was, what color I was, what my education level was, or any other stupid descriptor or box that this world often feels the need to use to categorize you. I was just a person there to learn. To me, that is what the world doesn't seem to understand about the hacker perspective. We are here to learn; we are here to support each other. The world tries to put hackers into boxes, using white hat, gray hat, and black hat. It's easy for people to then classify you into a category. But no one I have ever dealt with on a BBS or on Hack The Box has ever asked me what color my hat was. We never look at police and wonder if they are a white hat cop or a black hat cop. The conversation is more around ethics than anything and, much like anything in this world, a few bad apples spoil it for everyone.
I know not everyone thinks like I do. And I know communities have their problems. I am not saying the hacker community is perfect. Not everyone is in it for the same reasons as myself, and I know that there are some people out there who are in it for elitism or aggressive reasons. But I have only come across these people a few times in my life. Otherwise, the people I have associated with 95 percent of the time want the world to be a better place. They want to share their knowledge with you and want truthful information out in the public for free. Like any good community, they want to build you up and not tear you down. And that is what I missed for those 20 years that I wasn't involved with hacking: that communal way of thinking. Since I have returned to the hacking scene, I have had nothing but encouragement from people I have talked to on Twitter or Hack The Box. Unlike my prior college teacher who advised I quit, these people have given me nothing but encouragement as I try to crack the boxes or complete the challenges. And I have found myself doing the same for others. Community is something we all need, and I am glad I have returned to mine.
Shout out: @DCAU7 on Twitter and Dethread, QusaiHasan, M3d1t4t0r, Sekisback, Cherk, and Seeker9 on HTB