Researcher. Builder. Hacker. Traveler.

Tag: hacking

The Goonies is my favorite hacking movie.

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My favorite conference asked the following question this morning: 

My answer was the noncontroversial WarGames and the controversial The Goonies.

My friend Steve Lord asks the question that inspired this blog post:

Why yes it is. Please let me explain:

Gooines: A group of working class families are being evicted from their houses to make room for an expansion of a country club.

Hacking:

Goonies:

Hacking:

Goonies:

Hacking:  Data was the original hardware hacker.  Any security conference you attend will have at least one talk of someone hacking non security related hardware.

Goonies:

Hacking: The Fratellis are basically a group of blackhat hackers who think they are a smarter than they really are and can be easily defeated by a group of teenagers. 

Goonies:

Hacking: The hacking community is basically built on taking a group of socially awkward people and forming tight knit and caring communities.

Felonies People Asked Me To Commit This Year

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I wanted to do a year end blog post and couldn’t come up with a good topic so I figured I would just list all the federal felonies people asked me to commit for them this past year by hacking the following:

Bosses Gmail account
Blog of a business rival
Multiple wireless networks
Twitter account of LeBron James
Target
Many, Many Facebook accounts
My son’s Marvel game so that he would never die.  (Ok, I actually tried to do this one).

Seriously… I am not built for federal prison so please stop asking me to commit federal crimes for you.  In most cases I can’t do it and in the rare case I can the need to not get jumped in the shower will stop me from helping you.

The Unglamorous Work of a Security Practitioner

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Here is a stack 105 computers we are surplusing at work after 5 years in service.

Before they get sold at auction it is my job to make sure all the data is securely and permanently removed from the drives.   For this tedious job I turn to a copy of DBAN to wipe the drive 7 times (also known as the DoD 5220.22-M wipe).  It takes about 4 hours per PC so for most of the last 3 weeks I have been babysitting this stack of computers to make sure they finish correctly and without errors.

This is what “real security” work boils down to for most practitioners.  As much as I want to pretend that my job is chasing down hackers, adding new firewalls and yelling cheesy movie lines… it is taking care of the little stuff like this that ensures we don’t sell our users data that is one of the most valuable things I do at work.

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