Getting Your Start Because You Wanted to Get Paid For Hacking

[raffi at flossyourmind.com (Raffi Jamgotchian)]

My experience mirrors yours. After wardialing for BBSes, I ran one off  
of a 'teenage line' as we called it back then. Wrote some BBS software  
that sucked. After entering the workforce, outside email was  
introduced to our ccMail system which I did over an serial connection  
between a standalone PC that would connect to the Internet over ISDN  
and finger the ISPs POP server.
People wanted to browse (this is 1995-6) so we bought a Sun Sparc  
workstation and checkpoint and it was my job to set it up and harden it.

The only time that we were hacked (that I know of!) is during a  
pentest they found a modem connected to a conference bridge system  
running NT4 and an unsecure PCAnywhere that the vendor left on.

----
Raffi

On May 14, 2009, at 8:20 PM, Chris Merkel <cmerkel at gmail.com> wrote:

> A variation on that other thread. I didn't get my start in infosec
> because I got hacked. I was a huge (beige hat) fan of the movie War
> Games, if you catch my drift.
>
> BBSs, tymnet, telenet (no, that's not a typo kids...) and other random
> x.25 links found via wardialing were my first playgrounds. I remember
> one day, as the sun rose on a typical all-nighter, I said to myself
> "Cool, I just taught myself how to use DEC VMS, I bet I'd be good at a
> job working with computers..."
>
> So, who got into IT in the hopes that they could one day start getting
> paid for something they had done for fun in the past? (And is willing
> to admit it ;-)
>
> I did - it's still a lot of fun, though there's a lot more paperwork  
> involved.
>
>
> -- 
> - Chris Merkel
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