The Power of Try

by Felix Atter

If I had to boil down the core of what has pulled me through all the challenges and roadblocks and long nights in my journey through technology, it has to start with try.  I didn't know how to build PCs, so I found a bunch someone was throwing away in a Dumpster behind an office building and managed to get one running by scavenging from others.  I didn't know about soldering or electronics, so I bought a couple cheap kits and a book and started poking around.  Both of these early efforts at just jumping in had a few things in common.  I failed.  I failed a lot.  Then I failed some more, and finally I failed just right and saw some progress, so kept trying.

For a long time, that is what try meant to me.  Dive in and go look.  Five years ago I decided to try and make the jump from IT to cybersecurity full time.  I had no idea how to "try," and jumping in wasn't an option as nobody would hire me without experience, or so I thought.  I started telling everyone I talked to that I was looking for a way in.  Friends, family, the guy in front of me in a checkout line at the store, everybody was subject to my broadcasting this goal.  After a couple weeks of this, I accidentally told the right person who happened to know the guy that would become my next mentor.  "Try" had once again moved me along my journey.

Fast-forward two months and I was employed as a firewall engineer for a cybersecurity company and deep into imposter syndrome - feeling like I didn't get it or was not going to last six months before they saw how new I was and fired me.

By October of the following year, I had attended a couple of local hacker conferences and made some new friends, found even more mentors, and was starting to feel like maybe I could really become part of this community.

Last year I was able to attend Black Hat 2022 in Las Vegas and for the first time I found myself at a national conference of hackers, vendors, and security professionals of all kinds.  One of the first talks I heard was on breaking past personal insecurities and nerves or even fear to just approach the speakers after a talk.  This felt like distilled terror to an introvert like me, but in the heart of the message I saw it again... try.  After the talk, I walked up to the speaker and asked for a few minutes of his time.  To my surprise, it went really well.  I got some great insight on my career, I got encouraged to keep growing and studying, and even got handed a challenging idea for a research project.  This one moment of bravery on my end - and compassion on his - set the tone for not only my Black Hat experience but my DEFCON experience and most of the past few months.

In a one week period, I spoke to dozens of strangers, worked elbow to elbow with people I had never met to solve crypto challenges, helped run botnets in a lab, and even got to try and hack a city.  The whole time I was thinking to myself "How did I even get here?"  I first heard about DEFCON years ago and thought it sounded cool, but figured it was way outside my reach.  To be blunt, it was outside "my" reach.  I was finally able to get there because of at least a dozen points in my life where I chose to try, knowing I would probably fail.  In the five years I have worked for my current employer, I put in a request for that conference at least four times.  The first three were no and I kept at it.

After my conference experiences, I went back to the local conference in my home state and saw it with new eyes.  It was not a place I didn't belong, with people smarter than me and with more experience than me.  It was a gathering of our people sharing what they knew and what they loved and just waiting for the opportunity to share it with anyone who showed interest.

As hackers, some of what we do is fun or flashy.  Most of what we do is read, talk, research, and try things nobody else is looking at.  If I could put only one piece of advice in these pages, it would be to connect with your community.  If you look online (infosec-conferences.com), there are several resources to find local conferences and even hackerspaces and makerspaces.  If you can't meet in person or don't want to, find a Discord community and get connected.

It doesn't have to be all about popping Wi-Fi APs and cracking password hashes.  A lot of it is connecting with other people and tearing into a technology you know nothing about, just to have the fun of learning how it ticks and maybe, just maybe, getting it to do something new.  It's not about winning or becoming famous, or even about what gear you have.  It's about the power of try.