A few weeks ago, my father banking info was stolen and used which made me wonder what occurred. He used it at a gas station that out of town and had to battle the charges that occurred. While asking him what steps he took outside of the calls to banks, he was informing me that it would take 3 weeks for all to be resolved. What the hell!? 3 weeks in a world where each dollar counts don’t make sense to me. Also, what doesn’t make sense is that all accounts were frozen to get an investigation going. That made me wonder as well about the future of our society. From banking to social connections, many things are stored online. My children are living in a society cash has slowly been deleted from transaction methods. Could they be harmed in the future from cyber criminals? Hell no! If I can give them awareness as well as many others on how to protect themselves within the digital age that would make me so appreciative of the developer journey that I’ve traveled for many years. That’s when another thought occurred about hacks of large corporations.
With many hacks occurring on large corporations I started to wonder a lot about the digital world in general. Could wars not be placed in the traditional sense, but instead a digital? I remember as large data breach occurred with the credit bureaus and the news went nuts. Banking institutions were on the news as well as many other large corps and I find it quite crazy. After learning the ins and outs of Linux and Python, I thought that it was time I take a hand into protecting the future generation digitally. That’s when I started to look up different roles within development that specialized in security. After traveling deep into the “rabbit hole” I came across an article of Info Sec / Cyber Security. What a vast world I just entered of information unlike ever before.
There was an article that spoke about “Good Hackers” and immediately started thinking about the series Mr. Robot. After watching the full series (and I mean the whole damn thing) I started to think about a true career in being a hacker. No no no… not the bad type who loves to steal info and hack into systems for evil use. The hacker that will go into systems and then give the solutions to corporations, so they won’t have to worry about the headache. Although I am one who doesn’t give two f***s about the large corps, I do feel as a businessman if I were to build something incredible like those then I wouldn’t want anyone to destroy. I also don’t have the energy to rot in jail for hacking something after learning all this code thus far. S#!+ it took me a long time to learn much in the development of software while integrating it in hardware components. Anyways I wanted to provide some good to the world while making a name for myself within the industry. That’s when I started to read about the things needed to begin the journey of what I like to call “positive” hacking. After much research, I started to learn much more about the “White Hat and Black Hat” types of hackers which interest me more. Hmmmm why the word plays on the titles you ask? Yea… so I decide to give myself a title while traveling through the journey of a cyber security expert. The tile I came up with is … S#!+…. It will come in due time (laughing out loud). For now, I have the steps and it’s on to the races to be great so I started reviewing Networking.
If you don’t know how something works, how can you protect it? The way it moves must be known for security to be shown. These are the words of myself as I start to review the networking aspect of things. Getting into the topics of IP addresses and routers thinking about the ole dial up days. How I still can remember the sound as a youth amazes me. From networking being studied I slowly began learning BASH scripting. Scripting has become wonderful world in my eyes because you can create small programs that can install on systems. Many in the developer world will call them “Script Kitties”, but I rather call myself a growing “Script King”. The title “Kitties” just can’t be applied to me and my demeanor, so I’ll take “King” instead. No disrespect, just speaking on how I feel. From scripting I began to research some hacking blogs and boom…. It began. The journey to Cyber Security. Hope you enjoyed.
Until next time!
Peace and Light