I was barely 13 years old when I watched the world panic and struggle to prepare for the first global information catastrophe in history, Y2K. The inevitable disaster that never came still taught an invaluable, formative, lesson: Society is deeply reliant on computers and networks and a single software bug could have a devastating global impact. No government or military in the world could stop Y2K and that demonstrated to me the sheer power of code and it's ability to be exploited.

Before long I obtained a free dial-up account and found myself frequenting "H/P/V/C/A" webrings. The concept of 'illegal information' was absolutely fascinating to me. AIM bots, booters, flooders and 'warscripts' were more fun than any video game. In fact, this wasn't a game at all, it was real life. There was a text-file for any illicit computer act you could think of, for educational purposes of course.

I spent years learning the basics of breaking and repairing computers and soon Napster would become a global phenomenon. Napster wasn't just a program though, Napster was a person, a username and an important member of one of my favorite hacking groups, w00w00. That same year, 'China Eagle Union' hacked Whitehouse.gov and placed a Chinese flag on the homepage, practically without consequence. It was clear to me that new era of cyber-war was dawning. This was evidence again that hackers can and will change the world drastically.

Warez boards, FXP rushing, and the underground world of piracy exposed me to the art and challenge of subverting software security. Soon I'd complete my first 'crackme' and write my very own keygen for a commercial product. I never even used the software. Cracking it was a merely a means to an end; an opportunity to understand the ins-and-outs.

By highschool my path became clear: understand how to wield the formidable power of computer systems and learn how to protect them from attack. I had already been remediating malware for 4+ years and was ready for much more. Soon I was driving 2 hours to the Houston 2600 meeting at Ninfa's, where I'd be exposed to a world of eggdrop servers, BNCs, and the infamous 'vim escape' privilege escalation. These were 'real' hackers. Compared to them, I knew nothing and I knew it. Nothing could've been more inspirational. Phrack, Packetstorm and SecurityFocus became my new religion. John Perry Barlow's 'A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace' (1996) and The Mentor's 'The Conscience of a Hacker' became the bedrock of my internet philosophy. ‘The Cuckoo’s Egg’ and redacted reports of MOONLIGHT MAZE, OP SUNDEVIL and the like became my history books.

Countless nights and mornings were spent buried in the depths of shadowy irc channels. I was consuming text files from former hacker generations at a feverish, insatiable, rate. I nearly fell out of my chair when I discovered ZF0's lurid publications of rapacious pwnage and spoolz. Life online was becoming further and further abstracted. I've always had a very active life offline but, the world of the green and black terminal was exciting, always promising new challenges and unexpected anti-heros.

Now I've worked in IT for over fifteen years, doing everything from crawling in ceilings to run Ethernet, automation scripting with Python and Bash, virtualizing datacenters, analyzing malware, scouring pcaps, sysadmining, more sysadmining, gathering threat intelligence & OSINT, deploying honeypots and deception technology, disaster recovery, incident response, penetration testing, CNA/CNO/CND and just about every type of offense and defense in between.

My clients, customers and employers have ranged from the financial sector, higher education, healthcare, law, high-tech and span from startups to SMBs to Fortune 5s.
Regardless of what I'm working on, security is always the focal point. It is a mindset.

If you only play one position, you don't know the whole game._