My interest in hacking was initially peaked because of these movies…
Ever since Hollywood started molding the word hacker into the dark mantra that everyone is so accustomed to seeing, even today. Almost immediately, I became star-struck and thinking, “A hacker? How cool is that?”. Wearing the dark hoodie while lurking in the shadows in front of many computer screens, music playing to put them in the zone, and just typing away into the terminal with lines of code just streaming by. With the capability of getting into networks with only a few clicks of the keyboard and gain access to places you never knew existed. Having the ability to take any electronic devices and bend them to your will and go beyond what you wanted them to do. Unfortunately, that is where my dreams stayed for a while, especially; because I enjoyed my freedom and didn’t want to end up in jail since I had no direction or ideas of how to start being a hacker. But since I knew I had a natural aptitude for breaking and troubleshooting electronics, then fixing them to make them work again. I decided to do what any other person would do in my situation and got into the IT Field.
Fast-forward several years later to 2019; I’m still interested in hacking; however, I never took the time to look up what skill-sets a hacker needs and what it takes to become a hacker. In my mind, I set the bar high and thought they must be wizards with Linux and have all kinds of knowledge with programming languages at their disposal. At this point, I considered hackers as being elitists of the IT Realm, but little did I know I was about to learn more about hacking and not the “Hollywood” version that we have all known for so long. After being in the IT Field for quite a while with most of my certifications in Microsoft, CompTIA, Cisco, and VSAT Systems. I finally decided to go back and self-study to get my Security + Certification, which is one of the requirements for my current field working with the DoD. It must have been the best choice I had ever made, as I’d learned so much about IT Security – but I had a lot of questions and wanted more answers. Come to find out, taking the Security+ course was all that I needed to ignite my passion and start investigating how to become an Ethical Penetration Tester; so that I could finally break into the IT Security Field by any means necessary.
“Jack-pot!”
Going down this path I knew that I would have to become proficient at Linux, Windows, and some programming languages. I thought, “I took Java and was able to obtain the knowledge very easily during my time at college so it shouldn’t be too much different or difficult for me to pick up other programming languages”. Soon enough after a couple of minutes of Googling, I came across a course from YouTube by Heath Adams, aka The Cyber Mentor that was over 15 hours long titled: Zero to Hero Pentesting.
I thought, “Jackpot!”, plus, he has Deadpool on his opening slide, and who doesn't like Deadpool?! Immediately, I became mesmerized by the content and hanging on to every word he said. I took lots of notes from setting up Kali in a VM, learning Python3 basics, gaining root on Linux and Windows machines, and even getting some experience with setting up labs to practice Active Directory attacks. The whole experience was fun as I didn’t have ethical hacking experience beforehand. My exposure to Linux was very little, but now I had the knowledge to do more or at least attempt. Because I was still the "n00b" to the scene, I still felt like I was missing something, but I wanted to learn more. I looked around for additional ethical hacking training, especially now that I knew what I was looking for, to help me further develop my Pentester methodology.
"I finally decided to go for it"
Eventually, after lurking around on the TCM Discord and requesting to be a member of all of these other Discord channels, I came across someone talking about eLearn Secuirty’s eJPT certification and so I visited their website to look through all their courses and certifications that they had to offer. I found the PTS which offered the eJPT certification and signed up for the trial. After reading through the materials from the free trial, I finally decided to go for it and signed up for the Elite course offering. Next, my journey continues with the next blog of Hack The Box.
By the way, if you sign up for the Ethical Hacking Network you can get eLearn Security's Penetration Testing Student barebones kit for free.
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