Information “cyber” security journey…

In an effort to catalog my journey of technology security over my life, I will be posting at various times a review of different elements of my experience “past”, what I am learning now “present” and where I am planning to go “future”. This information may be useful to others, and perhaps not.

Being born in the late 70’s, computer technology has been an integral part of my youth. Form the Atari 2600 to the 486, I have grown up as computers – namely personal computing – grew up.

My first foray into cyber attacks was while working for an engineering subcontractor in the late nineties. I was actually working as a electro-mechanical design-drafter right out of tech school. However, I began leaning toward programming and some networking. (We ran a Novell network at the time). I taught myself Visual Basic for applications and LISP and began automating the design process. During this time, the company was “attacked” by a virus infection in a .VBS attachment. Since i was familiar with VB, I opened and examined the malicious code. It was renaming files across the network. I decided to write a similar bit of code that performed the opposite operation and injected our network in the same way the original code did. It undid the mess! Little did i know I was doing malicious code analysis and recon. It was fun and motivating to see it work. So I abandoned design work, and jumped into IT and software design.