The Beginning
You could say I was born to hack; I first used a computer in 1985, when I was 11 years old. Take a look at the computer I started with. It actually used cassette tapes for the operating system and all software. I was getting a magazine with programs that you could write in. (Sorry, I forgot the name of the magazine). These programs were written in either basic or Pascal. I wrote my first piece of code when I was 12 years old. That was just a bubble exploding and blowing up.
Over the next few years I would have different computers. From a Tandy 1000 to a TRS (trash) 80.In my local mall was a store called 21st Century Computers. I was there all the time, and the people who worked there taught me more things. \
The First Hack
This is one of my first hacks, and it works! The computers at Radio Shack were the intended victims. I put together a short boot script on a floppy disk and rebooted the computers. While they fumbled around trying to figure out what had happened, I sat back and laughed.
On this bootable floppy disk lived a file called autoexec.bat. This file would execute on every boot up the “code” was easy here it is:
mkdir c:\backup
move c:\config.sys c:\backup\config.bak
move c:\autoexec.bat c:\backup\autoexec.bat
attrib +h c:\backup
copy a:\autoexec.bat c:\
The beauty in this, is that if they fixed the “missing” config file when they rebooted it would corrupt it’s self again. Just for the record this is NOT ethical hacking.
I devastated the computer lab at the high school when I was 14 with this simple basic script.
10 lprint “NOT!”;
20 GOTO 10
The lprint command instructs the computer to send the output to the printer rather than the screen. The ; instructs the basic program to write NOT! on each line and then continue the screen until a CTRL-C is executed at the workstation to break the cycle. Before they realized what was going on, the printer had printed a stack of 2-3″ thick papers of nothing but NOT! repeated again and over. If you are wondering, NOT! paid respect to the greatest metal band of all time, Anthrax.
Online Fun (BBS)
Then, in 1990 or 1991, my father purchased a custom-built computer, which came with a modem. If memory serves, it was a US Robotics 9600 baud modem, which meant that my bandwidth was 9.6 kilobits/sec. With Prodigy being just a few years old, it is safe to assume we were early adopters of the online world. However, I did not utilize Prodigy; instead, I favored bulletin board systems (BBS). I ended up constructing my own BBS using WWIV BBS software because the BBS was like the dark web at the time. The difficulty was that I could only run the BBS when my father was not at home, so it was only available for a limited time. The castle was the name of this BBS, which had two sides: the main area and the dungeon. The dungeon was full of things that young people should not see.
Adult Years
I merely fooled around throughout the years, nothing too serious (that I can talk about here). I eventually went to work for an ISP as a senior FreeBSD administrator, running their DNS, Web, Mail, and Radius servers. When the company chose to sell, I bought a portion of the company and set out on my own. Until I chose to sell my business and become the CTO of another. I left the company because the CFO tried to blame me for embezzling money from the technology fund. It was established that she was the one who stole the money. This led to me working as an engineer for another huge IT firm. Before leaving the technology industry to explore some of my other interests.
From the age of 12 until the present, I have been honing my trade. I possessed multiple certifications (which I never renewed because I did not see the need to). Now I conduct penetration testing, and 100% of the profits go to a charity that helps youngsters with drug issues (my passion).
One of my tech passions is wireless technology, I was an early pioneer of wireless technology, in the early 2000’s (802.11b came out in 1999 for perspective). I began developing and creating a wireless infrastructure that connected an entire county. The network is still alive to this day just with upgraded radios for more bandwidth.