Hacker Perspective: ZauxZaux

We're probably all writing these submissions from quarantine.  We've had time to reflect.  Time to fear.  Time to have hope.  If we're fortunate, we've had an easy adjustment to forced "work from home" since it was probably already a perk of our jobs.  "What it means to be hacker."  The first time I became interested in the term was in the 1990s.  I watched one of the infamous movies that involved such folk and became instantly fascinated.  Coincidentally, it was also the same summer I got my first laptop.  What a monstrosity.  The worst battery life ever.  Heavy as brick.  Whirring fans and horrendous boot times.  Oh how I loved it dearly.

After watching that movie, I was convinced that I, a fool, had been overlooking this whirring brick and not seeing it for what it truly was: a bastion of power, a futuristic piece of machinery that could enable me to traverse cyberspace and travel into places unknown.  Or so I thought.  The only command I learned how to run that summer was dir, and I got as far as downloading Python and running some sample calculator program.  But f*ck if I knew what was really happening.  I was defeated: code and programs and hacker stuff were the things of super geniuses and people going to fancy schools, not of small town folk like me, whose only computer class up to that point was typing, and some CAD class that I had no interest in.  At the time, the would-be hacker dreams were snuffed out, I was resolved to AIM, Yahoo chat, online games, and whatever else kids of my age were getting into, and some of what they weren't.

Fast-forward to 2015.  I had made a proper disaster out of my life from high school to 2014, got a degree I would never use, a fair bit of debt to go with that silly degree, and not a clue as to what might be next.  Fortunately, by 2015 I had managed to pull myself out of the hole I had dug and began making some sort of an actual "life," albeit very humble at the time.  One thing I learned through all of it was that I was more capable than I gave myself credit for.  With enough time, effort, and will, one could not only rectify what had since seemed a hopeless life, but could also do all sorts of things.  Things like ride a bike 27 miles to work in the middle of a scorching summer because it was a choice between food and bike ride or gas and an empty belly.

That summer I delved back into Python again.  It was just as inaccessible to me, but the amount of learning information online had since become abundant and I had plenty of time on my hands, seeing as I had started fresh in a new place and had minimal social contacts.  I resolved to doing at least an hour a day on a common learning site.  I tracked my progress in a notebook.  I took notes.  I wrote for loops on paper like some masochist.  I dove into Linux.  Perhaps, just like most things in life, with enough time, effort, and will I could learn this stuff.

Technology was again at the forefront of my mind for a bit; it resumed the same place of intrigue and curiosity that it had when I was a child.  My fascination was nostalgic; I was no more a 20-something-year-old when I was delving into all this.  I was a kid again, indulging to my mind's content for hours at a time, lost in the endless complexity while barely scratching the surface.  What a time.

Fast-forward another year.  I found someone I loved.  We began trying to plan our lives a little bit.  At that point, I hadn't any better ideas than becoming a therapist.  The other half said that was fine, but that we would both be broke.  We laughed.  That same summer, entertainment made another lasting impression on me.  This time the theme was computer security.  And I couldn't get enough of vigilante hackers.  Down the rabbit hole I went, overloading my brain with all sorts of security information.  "Did you know you could hack your own Wi-Fi?"  "We got you this gift for your birthday, can you tell us what the heck even is a Raspberry Pi?"  I was convinced that this was the way forward.

I ditched the therapist idea and was resolved to getting into the tech industry as fast as possible.  It would be a two-pronged approach.  First, everything runs on software, right?  So software engineering seemed like a good approach, and in the spare time, I could continue to indulge my infosec obsession.  I began going to meetups.  I applied to internships left and right and was rejected.  I began working at a cell phone/computer repair store.  I met people in industry, some great, some not.  I made a home of a local hackerspace, volunteering time to help others starting the same path I was on.

Before I knew it, I had landed a low-level analyst position at a service provider.  My mom thought I literally guarded the computers - like mall security, but in front of a computer.  Then onward to an internal security team for a bank.  My first "real job" in industry.  They told me seven times between interview to first day "You know we do a follicle test, right?"  I don't know if it was my long hair that I had let grow for the past year for the first time in my life, or if that's how all banks were. Joke was on them though, I'd been clean for over two years.  There I learned what a great team looks like and how it functions.  What a good boss is.  What a good Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) is.  I also learned that even if you can't type well, you can still be a killer analyst.  My favorite analyst can't type for crap, but damn is he smart and funny as hell too.  I miss you, my Nigerian friend - you're right "we've got it too easy!"

To me, being a hacker has been about connecting with others.  Whatever that may look like.  It could be your BFF at a job, you know, the co-worker you're just a little bit closer with than the rest.  Or it could be someone from the meetup; you've never been to each other's houses, but damn if you don't greet each other with a hug and a smile and know a bunch of little oddities about the other's life.  It might be a teen-aged hacker that joined your Hack The Box crew that just laughs when you say "You're miles ahead of where I was at when I was your age."  Maybe it's the super whiz you know, the one that used to do some grayhat shit back in the day, the one that's a staunch open-source proponent, that drops little gems here and there about OPSEC, or wild ass stories from other places, that has a garage full of servers and doesn't have to work anymore because they're rich off of Bitcoin, but is working at some new place because a good friend is the boss, and they want to see that person succeed.

Maybe it's the leader of the hackerspace, the loud rambunctious one, that will say what's on everyone's mind, and maybe be embarrassing at times, but that's also one of the most selfless people you know; the one that offered you money which you were always too proud to take when you were out of work; the one that always offered and paid for lunch because they knew times were tough, and they never expected anything in return.  It's the person you only knew by their handle and not their real name, that is until a former client from a contract job called looking for help, and then you thought "I know who needs this work more than I do right now..." so you had to message them to get their name and info; and they trusted you enough and ended up making a bit of coin.

It's the person that thinks you're the whiz, but they don't realize that the only reason you know what you do now is because you paid way too much for power over the summer running your own server, and learned a million ways to break an operating system, including but not limited to: recursively chown'ing a directory and not giving a f*ck; being super 1337 and encrypting your disk, then forgetting the password; banning yourself from a Virtual Private Server (VPS) because you were hitting the wrong IP; running commands on files with * instead of using Tab completion because you were too impatient to train your muscle memory; rsyncing without a dry run and copying dest to source instead of source to dest; breaking your LAN because you didn't understand default gateways and only learned enough networking to get by... the cup runneth over.

Being a hacker has become to me just as much about bits and bytes as it is about others.  It's about staying curious and continuing to learn.  The transition to being someone that RTFM, and grinning nostalgically at someone whose shoes you were once in getting frustrated and turning to you for an answer.  More importantly, it's about being willing to give that answer.  To extend the hand that was extended to you.

Sometimes we go overboard.  I do.  I have to remind myself it's okay to say no sometimes.  When I'm volunteering, I have to remind myself that I'm a volunteer, and a human first.  If I'm not keeping myself sane and happy, then I'm damn sure not going to be pleasant or of much use to others.  Being a hacker is about being humble.  Being able to say "I don't know."  Because, more often than not, I don't know.  That's become more true in my new position.  The first week I grasped the gravity of the situation and the fires we were putting out... the amount of change we were in.

I had a sleepless night full of stress when it all sank in.  "What have I done!?  I gave up cushy cozy bank life for stress and a bit more coin.... What a fool!"  Then a five minute meditation the next day before work put things back into perspective.  I was amongst friends.  Real friends, the same kind of friends I mentioned above.  One of them gave me some solace: "You have to remember that a lot of this is screwed up, but also, it's not your fault that it's that way.  Remember that."  So when all is said and done, we'll either emerge, having managed to pull off the seemingly impossible, or we'll go on to other things - saner places with saner paces.

Being a hacker is about finding a way.  Finding a way to get in.  Going back over the port list; what service were we missing?  Scouring through the commands again; what flag were we missing?  Googling harder; what article was I missing where this was done the right way?  Implementing logging in your scripts; if only someone had built a sane way to track the progression of your programs!  Being obsessed with reverse engineering for three week chunks; hey, I solved it and know all these r2 commands... that will surely be gone the moment something else catches my curiosity.  It's about people saying You're always on your computer!" and then having enough sense to step back and take a break, cook something delicious, or watch something interesting.  It's about not letting praise go to your head, not because you can't take a compliment, but because you are in tune with your place and you know when you have become a big fish in a small pond.  It's about sending DMs to that super nice Twitter person, who selflessly had an open ear for your concerns career-wise and offered you whatever advice they could, and then subsequently congratulating you once things worked out in your favor but you forgot to tell them so you did it six months later.  It's about empathy for another Twitter friend doing security work in your home state; their pictures of the landscape make you long for home, and as they're going through tough times you wonder what if life had been different and you had somehow stayed there and been able to befriend this person IRL.

It's about information warfare and your cognitive dissonance as bots flooded Twitter during a big election; how you knew, not exactly, what was going on and you watched the effects play out; how you debated whether or not it would be worth the time to try and discuss such events with your parents on Christmas break.  Sometimes it's about getting a foreign language intel report, then tediously copy/pasting it into Google Translate and blasting the result on Twitter because people were looking for an English copy - only to have the team drop their appropriately translated version a day later.

Being a hacker means being able to go into the unknown of the technological realm as far as your curiosity will take you.  Engaging in debates with others.  Helping others.  Learning from others.  Staying up late.  Drinking too much caffeine.  Becoming wiser.  Discovering your true self.  Doing what you love.  Being there for those that love you.  Identifying with vigilante hackers.  Begrudgingly going to vendor events.  Disagreeing with friends.  Lasting relationships, fading relationships.  Excessive bandwidth.  Cheap laptops with modded RAM.  Responding to inquisitive text messages with "download TeamViewer first"  Sending a "Let Me Google That For You" link when you're feeling like a turd.  Learning to love a language, learning to hate a language.  Upgrading shells to fully interactive TTYs.  Mapping SMB shares.  Loving operating systems, hating operating systems.  Being a hacker is every bit as dualistic as anything else in life.  Black hats, white hats, gray hats.  Wherever you are, happy hacking.  We can do it.  It's not over.  It's only just begun.