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You Don't Need to Start as a Teen to be an Ethical Hacker (Video)
Meet Justin Whitehead. While a lot of his contemporaries were going to college, he became an Airborne soldier. After that he went to college, became an IT technian, got some experience as a Computer Forensic Analyst, and met people who looked like they were having a good time as penetration testers. So he took some recommended classes,got hired by One World Labs, and last week at B-Sides Austin, he and coworker Antonio Herraiz gave a talk titled 'Spanking the monkey/How pen testers can do it better.
Justin is 40, an age where a lot of people in the IT game worry about being over the hill and unemployable. But Justin's little video talk should give you hope -- whether you're a mature college student, have a stalled IT career or are thinking about a career change but want to keep working with computers and IT in general. It seems that there are decent IT-related jobs out there even if you're not a youngster; and even if you didn't start working with computers until you were in your 20s or 30s.
Justin is 40, an age where a lot of people in the IT game worry about being over the hill and unemployable. But Justin's little video talk should give you hope -- whether you're a mature college student, have a stalled IT career or are thinking about a career change but want to keep working with computers and IT in general. It seems that there are decent IT-related jobs out there even if you're not a youngster; and even if you didn't start working with computers until you were in your 20s or 30s.
im 44 and one of the top actual hackers in world//// been that way for like 15 years....im employable all right....haha
guess what i aint helpin the nsa or friends EVER...
I've yet to see proper code written by someone under 30. Including myself. No, I'm not over 40 yet, but everyone who I know who is, and is still writing code are rock solid coders. I can take a friggin' static analyzer to their code, and not get a single issue found.
Posting AC, as I'm terribly age-racist here.
seriously?
I feel far more competent at 40+ than I did at 25.
And I did learn how to hack before I was a teenager.
Typical article about yet another white male in the IT field. Why not an article on a black or a woman pen tester, Roblimo? Why must you hate?
Justin sounds like a great guy but the way his story is being pitched does a disservice to anyone dumb enough to buy in to the hype.
Justin was able to turn around his career by being a self-starter. Infosec is fashionable right now but it's attracting talent-less hacks like flies as a consequence. During the gold rush the late ones to buy pick axes didn't strike their fortune and this slashvertisement sounds like it's selling hope to desperate has-beens looking for a new career.
The consensus among employers hiring "hackers" seems to be that they don't want you unless you have your Cisco/CompTIA certs. As a consequence: selling people the notion they can escape being useless in the modern economy by becoming a career "hacker" is doing them a disservice. The credentials required for that narrow specialization are identical to the credentials required to get a job that doesn't require shaving a Mohawk on your head and are in almost equally hot demand.
Hackers don't need to be convinced to study the material, they need to be convinced to play the Human Resources game. If you're selling the material, just recruit people in to networking. It doesn't sound as glamorous but that's the point: you don't have to be a self-promoting ninja savant to make a career out of it.
...Ever!
Dark Reflection
You Don't Need to Start as a Teen to be an Ethical Hack (Autoplaying Video)
HOORAH!!!
This video autoplays on my browser and it is very frustraing at work with my sound on, I load it in my vivaldi beta and it says i must install adobie media installers dmg and install install so install can download and install the flash player media plugin. Please help Someone at Slashdot Fix your autoplaying video flash bugs. Thank you.
The title could be reworded to "Masturbation/How pen testers can do it better."
I think I'll skip that video. Thanks.
Discuss.
How's he encouraging more women to join the field?
By giving talks about Spanking The Monkey of course, how could that possibly fail?
People who get into security for a paycheck are not hackers, they're security professionals. Hackers are people who do it on their own time, for its own sake. It's not tinkering if you're getting paid for it. Just a semantic nuisance that annoys me, as a non-hacker, and a security professional, but also as someone who has been around REAL hackers for 20 years. If I was independently wealthy, I would not spend my time "hacking," because I am not a hacker. Security is a job to me.
Calling security professionals "hackers" unduly deprives true nerds of a designation they deserve to reserve. A 9-5er CEH is not the same as someone who bug hunts for free because that's his version of playing basketball. Maybe it's a dead horse, but it's a dead horse that still stinks to high hell.
Don't expect me to hire you until you are 40.
I'm well over forty and I'd say none of those things apply (well, perhaps a little balder). I'm not as strong as I was at 25 but I'm not weak either, and I can go up many flights of stairs without winding... basically all of those things are a warning that you should stay active.
But that's beside the point, the biggest problem you list, the inability to learn new things, is what happens when you stop learning long enough. The longer you go without doing new things, the harder it is to get back into it... your mind may not be quite as plastic as when you are a kid, but I'm not sure it's any more incapable of learning at 40 than at 20. It's just there is more life baggage built up around you to overcome...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I realized all the thinly veiled and thickly veiled AstroTurf articles about women in IT, and articles like this one about "being relevant after 40", and other garbage.
It's not news relevant to my industry, or chosen profession.
At all.
It's completely irrelevant.
There are much better sources of information.
The key is to smell the waft of giving you reasons to discount yourself and discourage yourself.
WTF is with at douche bag SJW in every goddamn post recently? Your rant will not work here pal, we are better educated than you! Come out of hiding and debate, I triple dog dare you!
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
But I have to add that all of the hype is plain old wrong if you want to be a career IT security specialist. Hacking, or actually performing a penetration test, is a very small portion of the job. Seems like all of the hype around coding currently to try and flood the market with people thinking they can "hack" to reduce wages may be happening here. I don't know if that's true or not, but seems reasonable given the treatment of "coders" lately.
I was also confused at the "people over 40 can't find jobs" stuff, because after I hit 40 my desirability went way up. Maturity, especially in IT security, is a well sought after trait.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
This seems like a marketing video with a lot of keywords while giving little information. Most pen-testers are script-kiddies. It sounds like he is using the same tools as everyone else, not developing anything new, only writing a report rather than filling in boxes on a form.
It sounds more like he is trained in PR and is attempting to make a success story and campaign out of thin air.
I think i'm the monkey for watching the entire video. The company that "took a chance" on him, thanks for hiring Vets but i think the 13 year old "hacker" has more out of box experience than the entire company if Justin is any indicator of their team.
His lack of any off hand configs / mods / changes he keeps referencing makes me think he runs the "out of the box" (read: they have a box and he picks a config out of it) script like everyone else.
I know it sounds shitty, but pen-testing is not glamorous, isn't difficult, out of the box and isn't hacking.
As a White Male, I was actively discouraged from joining the field by my parents who thought it was for criminals. Toughen up buttercup.
The high salaries reflect the insane number of hours required to be good. These aren't classroom hours where you stretch 2 hours learning in to an 8 hour day.
These are obsession hours:
-Google searches and phone calls scratching at the surface of a subject that doesn't even have a book written about it yet.
-Loved ones getting upset because you're on your laptop while they're trying to sleep, and daydreaming about a problem while they're trying to have a conversation with you.
-Waking up in the morning and realizing you've been dreaming about the problem while you slept.
Hackers don't need the validation of their peers to do the work. I've never worked as a security professional so I can't comment on the work environment. When I see more women doing this stuff for fun, I'll decry the fact that they don't do it for money.
If there was so much interest a woman executive should be able to put help wanted advertisements in a magazine targeted at women and correct the market inefficiency by hiring at a discount. I don't see that happening. If you want to social engineer demographics start at K-12 but don't be surprised if the "easy money" has moved on to some other specialization by the time you have a bunch of techno-hipster HS graduates flooding the job market.
You Don't Need to Start as a Teen to be an Ethical Hacker
You don't need to start as a teen to be anything. You have to start as a baby like everyone else.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Please, PLEASE, put noobs like this in charge of important stuff we want to hack... PLEASE. Just sayin'
Mega-props for the lyrics. I haven't seen that in tech circles, well, ever. And now, "C-130 rollin' down the strip, 64 Rangers on a one-way trip, mission top-secret, destination unknown, ..."
Where is it? Let's not further exclude the deaf from the internet, daily life is marginalization enough.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
It's amazing how many trolls are missing the point of this interview.
It became too late to become an ethical hacker when the FBI started bullying people into working for them. "Here, come disrupt your life no matter the consequences to you or your family, or we'll destroy your life." Screw that. Some fields can't pay enough to be worth their risk. When story after story about the people who can hack involve their being bullied by their government, it's just not worth it to learn those skills.
Or at least this is my impression. If I'm wrong, then it might help if electronic security were further legitimized at the academic level. We haven't had an overhaul of related academic majors in too long. You can study "Information Technology," which boils down to how to connect routers and work spreadsheets, or you can study Computer Science, which these days boils down to a practical approach to calculus and a primer to teach yourself how to actually produce software. But the shortcomings of this academic template aren't going to matter until the PhDs making money on it speak up.