Origins of my passion for infosec

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Created on Wed. 17 Jan 2024

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10 Years ago is when I started tinkering with computers! To commemorate this anniversary I thought I could do a quick blog post to look at the operating system that started this adventure and how I started out in computer science, info sec and programming.

On youtube I started getting recommended videos about lost IT related media that have been recovered and then reviewed. This made me think what old "lost to time" equivalent software would I have in my backlog then it hit me the OS that got me interested in IT Security.

A weird coincidence

When I was around the ages from 11 to 14 I was a big fan of Team Fortress 2 and generally valve games like Half Life 2 and Left 4 Dead 2 those where my first times messing around on Computers and getting the Orange Box form my uncle when I was around 12 really got me into computers. Team Fortress 2 had this thing with custom UI's and skins that got me into modifying games back in the day and I somehow managed to Jailbreak my old iphone back in the day which allowed me to create my own custom mods for my games. I also loved this old lost to time game that was Crafted which was basically a 2D minecraft which I still have the .ipa for ^^:

My hate for windows

When I was around 13ish I had to do some projects at home for middle school and got a laptop to write this "Internship Report" to be honest my mother was the one to do it for me and I was grounded for like 2 weeks but after that I finally had my own computer. With that computer I was able to play Minecraft and the amazing Team Fortress 2 The laptop was one of the old VIAO from sony with Windows 8. Expectingly my enjoyment didn't last very long since 1 month in having this laptop the Windows 8 updated to Windows 8.1 and the laptop got it's hard drive corrupted and I wasn't able to play anymore. Now after googling online how to fix the laptop and taking an entire day with my 13 year old brain I managed to fix that laptop for the exact problem to happen again the next day :/ So I put away the laptop and stopped using it since it was just broken.

Reborn

After a few months of my first laptop to be broken I was gifted a 2nd hand laptop from my uncle with a copy of Windows XP on it. This is what sparked my interest again inside of computers but with that old laptop it wasn't possible to play any of my cool games :c. I then after a few more months turned 14 and for some reason I thought I should try out to make a virus on the machine since I wasn't using it I thought what if I broke it :/ I then from there googled a bit and discovered Fork Bombs

Now from that I was hooked! I then started researching more on how to learn information security. I obviously to learn that went on google and searched how to become a hacker. I wish I could find the video but I think that is lost to time but the video was basically a 3 step process 1st Programming, 2nd Networking and 3rd learn hacking. I actually took that quite literally so programming is what I learned and I googled Learn Basic Programming. Even 10 years later the same tutorial showed up which is quite funny!

In retrospective now that I somewhat know what I am doing this google search is quite wrong since it lead me down to learning Basic programming! I used to use this software called FBIde which is basically a Free Basic IDE. From that I was even more hooked learning function if statements etc.. I then quickly got done with that tutorial and went onto python through Learn Python The Hard Way which is the best programming book I read even too this day. Zed Shawn the writer of that book really influenced the beginning of my journey in programming for the best I loved the python and the C books which started everything!

HackThis!

Now after a 2 months of coding I then discovered HackThis.co.uk which actually got me into Web Application Development and Hacking from there I actually just worked every day on HackThis and on the different books to learn as many programming languages I could. I will do a blog post some day of me revisiting my first projects from back in the day.

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Thank you for reading! This post was quite fun to make since I found it quite novel to revisit since it was my debut 10 years ago in cyber sec hopefully this post inspires you to start cybersecurity as well and to do cool projects where ever you are in life! If you want a copy of that windows XP skin that I kept it since and I'll share it to whoever wants just contact me on my new twitter ^^ also follow me on my socials if you want and you can also support me through github sponsors!