Hacker

The sun came up early, at least it felt like it came up early. I suppose it came up at exactly the time it thought was right. It was just early for me. I had a very late night the previous night. Most of my nights are late. I’m a hacker, through and through. A lot of people seem to get scared or confused when they hear the title hacker. They ask questions like, “Have you ever gained access to secret things?” Or “How do I protect my data from people like you?” The truth is people seriously misunderstand what the name means.

Hackers are not people after your data, or necessarily evil in any stretch of the imagination. We are just enthusiasts. We love technology and all the applications that entails. Sure there are people out there who choose to use this knowledge for nefarious purposes, which just led to us claiming a sub genera of hackers, the Black hats and the White hats. As one would expect the white hats are the “good” guys and the black hats are the “bad” guys. Really though we all sit in many different shades among those distinctions. A true white hat would never do anything interesting, and a true black hat would have no motives beyond watching the world burn (there are some of these, but like any field the outliers are few and far between).

As a hacker, I found that my best time, the time where I have the most brain power to exert is in the wee hours of the night, where the world is mostly quiet. No distractions around, where I can just listen to repetitive music and tinker away at the technology in front of me.

Last night had been a particularly interesting night where I found what I believed to be a massive security hole in a common piece of code. My mind was blown as I tried millions of iterative attacks at the software, seeing if I could in fact break through it. I mean you have to understand how to break something if you really want to know how to fix it. Hours of watching the screen produce output I couldn’t possibly go through in my lifetime, I was just searching for large inaccuracies. It was a strange sense of excitement, waiting for the results of the attack on the code to run.

I was both hoping I had in fact found something, and at the same time dreading it. You see, if I had, in fact, found a security hole, I would want to also try and find a good way to shore it up, and have that available with the announcement of the potential breach, like I said, I’m not a black hat. I guess the sun felt like it was early because the night had led to nothing. Turns out I misread the lines I was looking at and spent the entire night all for naught, or perhaps not, in the end I was more sure that the security was good. I guess that counts enough to get a good days sleep.

-V-