I’ll never forget the terrifyingly beautiful song of that dial-up modem, patiently anticipating the successful connection to the mysteries that lie on the other side. Spending more time in chat rooms than I should have at that age (middle school) made me realize how untamed the early internet was. This was before online games but my brother and I had a few different gaming consoles that we collected over the years. Whether we were plaing NES, Sega, Gameboy, whatever… it didn’t matter, we we’re always trying to find loopholes or a glitch to take advantage of.

My voyage into the dark arts truly began like many others in this field, with the catalyst being online gaming. I’ll make a gaming-focused post at another time but for this track let’s talk about Counter-Strike. I started playing in CS 1.2 and was instantly hooked. We had a small clan, playing on legit servers. Occasionally we would run across the type of ‘hacker’ who had no shame… speed hacks, wall hacks, aimbot, noclip, you name it. Matches with a player like this were both frustrating and intriguing.

Between chats, forums, and manual searching, I was trying to figure out how these feats were possible. I decided to get my hands on one of the high-end kits and walk through the implementation. Luckily, some of these early guides & readmes were actually pretty well documented. Taking note of the specific file types I was working with and required edits/actions, I was unknowingly building a foundation for a future in cyber security.

(more updates coming)