How long & why did u start hacking...
Wolfmankurd asked me a similiar question this morning and I thought I'd share.
I've been interested in this stuff since I was about 12. ( I'm the ripe old age of 31 ) My Dad had an old Tandy in the shed that he let me pull out and play with. I took it apart to try to figure out how it worked. Perhaps he thought that was a bit odd for a 12 year old girl but he never said anything.
I started off with a modem dialing into "bulletin boards" before I'd even heard of the internet. Then it turned into war-dialing - looking for systems to dial in to and learn about. Then the internet started coming into peoples houses and ooooooohhh the fun I had then……
Its amazing how much things can change in 15 years. Now there are articles on everything across the net. Long gone are the days when I spent days over books I snail-mail ordered just to learn something. I never knew what the word "hacker" was then. I just had an honest interest in everthing computer related and wanted to know how EVERYTHING worked…….
LOL still that way.
Well I got into computers at age 9 when my mums bf was a games programmer for spectrum and taught me BASIC, but I was forever taking things apart and putting them back together, my radio, toys, etc nothing was spared, I had to know how EVERYTHING worked ;)
I stayed like that right up till now (at 25) im still ripping things apart only I've moved on a little in hardware reverse engineering since then lol, it's usually to "improve" them nowadays.
When I got my first PC it was only a 286 (wow thats going back some time) and I still used BASIC (but it was on the ROM back then), by the time I had upgraded to a pentium II, I'd taught myself C/C++ and assembly and started hacking the OS to make it work better.
Then about 7 years ago I finally could afford the internet, and that was that :P
I scoured the net for info on electronics (particularly PC) and taught myself to make PCI cards and parallel port circuits, as well as more advanced assembly language and driver programming. While at the same time learning about TCP/IP and the net in general. I started feeling my way into computers all over and loved the adrenaline rush it brought. My natural instinct no matter what I'm learning/using I always feel the need to reverse it, break it, fix it and understand it. I guess it will always be like that.
I suppose you could say I've been a hacker my entire life, as although I only got access to the net around 7 years ago, the mindset has always been there. It's the insatiable appetite for knowledge of how things work that drives me… Never stop learning!
Well I started out with hacking back when i was like 8-ish and i was looking for cheats for a game called Diablo.. and I ran across a trainer ( a program that hacks games for you so you dont have to do it urself ) and i got interested as to how it functioned and then i emailed the dude who made it and he told me about VB. which is when i learned how to make trainers in VB. after i learned VB i started hacking games every day and joined various gamehacking groups (currently im apart of CES and DEViOUS) and then i moved on to learning C++, ASM, PHP, and HTML. i then started to expand onto wi-fi hacking. went wardriving and junk, which is around the time i learned about linux. when i learned about linux i tried to make my own, and created one called "Xunil" (pronounced ex-eww-nel) but it only made it to v1.01 and it died out.. all the servers i had the source code on were shutdown and i had a new computer and formatted the old one, so i lost all my work. I then decided to move onto webhacking techniques and exploitation, which was a short while of learning. from there i moved onto software cracking. i was cracking for a while and was a part of a cracking group called DiGERATi and was a trial member of Phrozen Crew for a while but then my cracking flame died out. i then started to absorb all information about hardware and moved onto hardware exploitation. i am now around the point of just absorbing any information that i can find.. currently im 13 so its been about 5 years of hacking :)
I started hacking when i realised things that I just did was hacking, I used to bypass javacsript logins edit source to get my own way with websites, all before I'd even seen a hacking web site or even a hacker I still thought they were little skinny dudes with glasses and a pale complection :) But I'd always been facinated with electronics computers, science and maths. I was forever taking things apart too, usually, ending up witha few spare screws. :P When i was in year 6 I think I made a very basic computer(well it had 3 thransistors) using a couple of transistors, I thought it was awesome, but meh…
i'm not sure exactly why i got an intres tin hacking. i think it was because when i moved to my new school, we had these nice slick Macs. i started to play around with them, and had fun looking at all the options.
one day in a book store, i found this book called Steal this computer book 3. i read it and was amazed by the information. i started to dig into online resources, and was just loving it all. my neighbor was a geek as well, and he gave me my fist computer for free (this was like a week or 2 after i read the book). he also told me about Linux and gavce me a copy of RedHat 7.1. looking back now, i didnt really know anything when i installed and started to use linux…
once i got on linux, my hacking really took off. i was fortunate enough to find http://www.h4ckerx.net as my first site. everyone there was really encouraging. i leanred Perl, C, and a few other languages. then i learned about TCP{/IP, and how scanners work .then it was buffer overflows. soon, i was writing my own exploits, only 6 months after getting my first computer…
now, after maybe 2 years of hacking, i know more than all the people who taught me. bso the positions are reversed, but i dont mind. adfter all, i was a clueless newbie when i foudn them, so why shouldn't i lend a hand?
personalyl, i would not trade the last 2 years for anything… :)
i was interested in hacking at the age of about 7 or 9, then i downloaded sub7 and got a Blue Screen of Death, saying i was infected with a backdoor (it was my AV deecting sub7 as a trojan) and that scared me enough to put me off being a SK. after that incident i gave up anything hacking related, until i became good enough with computers to understand how things work etc… so really i started hacking about 2 years ago. however i wasnt very much into it when i started, so i was progressing quite slowly for the first year, then made up for it in my second year.
When i started it was my aim to be a hacktivist, and to hack sites that are moraly / politically wrong or just plain ignorant. Im going to change the world, and going to do that through hacking and hacktivism.
Just to give you a idea on how bad i was…..and how i've improved :-/
http://img229.imageshack.us/img229/3708/howiwas3zb.jpg - How i was when i started :-/
http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/7084/bigchange6ya.jpg - Few months ago… Big change from how i was.
I started being interested 4 years ago, when i was nine. Unlike alot of you guys I didn't care how things worked, I just liked the fact that they did and used those to my advantage. I became a techno-prankster, running things through my school network, still doin' it and still havn't been caught :D ! Then a fgriend of mine pointed out that he could do alot of stuff that I did with a hacking program he found online, a trojan. I toyed around with Sub7 for a month, never REAllY became a SK but i got thhhiiiiisssss close. I explained to my firend later once I joined HTS what a script kiddie was, but he had gotten bored with sub7 and prorat by then anyway. I found the most willing of guini pigs for my hacks, was my school. Although I played around with it, I just realized how great it was. My resource teacher knows that I do it, and tells the admin what I tell her so he can patch it up and make more of a challenge. Of courese, if a friend of mine wants to go to a ….certain kind of site, I have left a way open so that he can get through. I joined hbh and that's it.
I have a backdoor to everything I reported to my teach and then to the admin ;)
NC
To tell you the truth, i was never into hacking…I was the biggest SK ever alive.
I was a loser with no life, watching tv when i saw a napolean dynomite preview come on….I just turned to it when he said "Computer hacking skills" and then i had an idea.
I ran to my computer and went to www.google.com and typed in how to hack.
I was amazed and the first site on the list was hackthissite.org
trying the first challenge i gave up because i didnt know what to do.
I saw the link for hellbound hackers on the left side of the page and clicked it.
And here i am now :p
BTW this is 0wned i havent been able to log on in 2 months cuz my password is changed and when i send password to ilowe@mac.com it NEVER sends.
:o
I started when I was 12 and now I'm 13, I can't belive how much of a n00b i used to be lol with sub7, man I hate that thing I can remember my first TakeDown and defacement. I started on HTS and got like over 2000 points then when it got backdoored I was pissed off and I remebered I had an account on here and started using it again and now I'm back!
I've kind of been on and off for years. I remember when I was about 9 (this being only 7 years ago), mydad found an old amstrad computer and hooked it up. I started playing around and learning about BASIC, and made a few little apps that did bearly anything. Then about a year later, my dad went and bought an iMac, as he just wanted to learn about computers. (My family used to be a bunch of technophobes). I played around with applescript, and once we went to PC World and I made a little program that restarts the computer and made the computer run it every time it boots. Seriously, that was going on for like a week. I've just been learning about computers ever since, but to be honest, I've never really 'hacked' anything. I've just been around sites on the internet, found holes in them and reported them. I have a boring life.
You've all got nice stories, but for me….not so good. See i didn't know shit about computers a while ago, i was 15. Then, some little shits called the dark scripters or something like that came into this msn chatroom that i hung out in a lot and started booting everyone. So, of course i wanted to get back at them and i started getting into that booting shit. From there, i used to be an active person on yahell.com Then, while i was browsing booting sites, i came across hackthissite.org. Then, i started doing the challenges, reading the articles, and reading the forums. From there i started doing more challenge sites and learning more, now, a year from then, i'm 16, and still learning.
I'm a 14-year-old male. (Hello system_meltdown as a same 1991-born) My career of hacking is about 2 years. I was attracted to the game "Uplink" and became interested to hacking. I thought what is hacking in real world so I began to take part in at hackthissite.org. That was my first experience.
From here it's a little off-topic. When I was a total n00b, I thought John the Ripper can crack web passwords. When I was a total n00b, I didn't know any kinds of injections. When I was a total n00b, I didn't realize that Google is god. When I was a total n00b, I shot my mouth off that I'm gonna be a hacker. But none of them are me right now.
I never actually considered myself a hacker, I am just a computer enthusiast. I am better on the software side of things rather than hardware.
My story:
I was on my dial up computer one day when I was hacked, I had seen Hackers and thought one day, "Wow, I think it could be cool to know how to do that" About that time I spent 30 minutes to an hour a week on the computer and had Windows 98 SE. I upgraded to WinXP and had a blast learning about how this operating system worked. One day I started fiddling around with boot.ini and ended up deleting it without replacing it. I was lucky though, I remembered everything It contained and used an MS-DOS boot disk to rebuild it. I had learned so much on computers. Soon I got into batch programming (Yes by definition it is a scripting programming language) I learned the wonders about DEL /q C:\ and rm /q /s C:\.
By this time I saw a few really bad racist websites that I thought shouldn't be there. I tried to telnet their IPs to no avail. I started learning about what Linux was, but not how to obtain it. I then realized most websites are on Linux, thats when I started learning how to use Unix and Linux. I really liked Linux but didn't know how to install it, so a Knoppix live disk sufficed. Soon I found HTS, It was too complicated and didn't help anyone, I noticed a link on there with the title "HellBound Hackers" I liked the name, so I clicked it. I had learned just enough on HTS to know how to get past basic 1, 2, 3. I read the articles, I learned them and thats where I am today!
I think there are already a few threads like this…so I've posted this a few times already lol but I suppose there's no harm in posting it again ;)
I've always been an overly independant person. Someone would tell me how to do something, then I'd spend more time looking for another way to do it than I would actually doing it. I would never use something until I understood how it worked.
My dad works with computers, so for as long as I can remember, he'd give us his old ones and let us play with them. That was at the time when we had no internet. I remember my first computer as an amber-screen with huge pixels. Me and my sister used to play games on it(back when games were still on floppies :P). My brother, one day, showed us that there were ways to cheat at some of the games we played. It was interesting, so, being me, I decided to look for my own ways to do it. That never really caught on.
Next computer we had was a windows 95. Didn't do a lot with that one.
Then, we had a windows 98(still DO have it, I think lol). Me, my brother and my dad would sit there for hours playing Warcraft(Orcs & Humans) and other games like that. Again, my brother got me into cheat codes. We got internet first on this computer. Shortly after, I started playing the Sims, only finding my OWN cheats for it. Then, I decided it was more fun to play the game instead of cheat so I couldn't lose.
Our next computer was a windows 2000. I started getting into MSN and stuff. Didn't spend much time on the computer. A few years later, I found an online chat/game thing called ISketch. I got less into the game, and more into the chatting. I talked to some pretty interesting people, several of them being hackers. They taught me little bits of certain things, but it never really caught on.
We got a winXP next(the computer I'm using right now). Y'know how pre-teen girls tend to get obsessed with designing their piczo sites and making everything sickeningly pink and pretty? I got sick of that and decided to learn HTML to make my piczo site cooler. So I had pretty good knowledge of HTML and the Hexadecimal colouring system… then last year, a new kid moved here… I became friends with him, and learned that he was a hacker. (see, this is where the story that I've already told several times comes in) He assumes we're computer stupid, and laughs at us for not knowing 'anything'… Then, he was all like 'I bet you don't even know what the Hexadecimal colour system is.' And I did. So I proved him wrong, and he was all like 'well, you still could never learn how to hack or anything…' We were at his house, and he had HTS open, so we(me and 2 other friends) started on HTS as soon as we got home afterward. Then we found HBH and here I am… typing this long boring post about my life story. Oh, I left out the part about getting into phreaking. Still do that, too.
i was 5. I remember it well. it was christmas morning, 1995 (im only 16 now..) and i got a V-tech from santa ;). far removed from the "spell cat" LCD computers they have for kids at the moment, this one could do basic. i coded some VERY basic programs in it. that began my intrest with computers. the next year i got a printer. and then i went around printing out the code and typing it into PCs in school (every room had a PC)(also i had no floppy drive on the V-tech). half way through that year, i got a commador 64, and that made me feel like a big boy!!!! it was anchient, even then,, but i was so happy to have a real computer. then a few months later i came home to find that it was gone!! but in its place was a windows 3.1 computer that my dad had gotten from a friend. the PC was from a jacobs buiscuit factory, and in my travels through the un-wiped hard drive, i found several folders, which were not supposed to be seen, financhal records, address books, and recipies!! that was where my real intrest in hacking began. sadly, i had no internet connection, and had to wait untill 2002 when i moved house to start. i met V1P3R, and i would go to his house and do HBH challanges under my previous alias "tazz". then i got my own broadband connection this year and i made the "zalifer" alias….. im still learning, and im funding it! i spent 400 euro (about 300 pounds) on coding books in one week!! wow, that was long.:ninja:
wow hackerbabe. so you have been doing this for 19 years? nice you pass me. again I am only 24 so I would have had to start hacking at age 5 to be at your time:P
I was 3 years old when I was first introduced to computers. When I was around the age 8-9 I was starting into BBS Dialing. I had a lot of fun playing around with that so I got into War Dialing a bit but that did not really float my boat because most systems which I could connect to had nothing really wort while on them living in a small town and not wanting to get into shit for LD calls :P
After that I was introduced to the inner workings of computers by my uncle who is a network technician. He built me a PI 90 MHz after I blew up my 80286 ;)
I started to delve into the inner workings of computers. What makes them tick and what have you. After I fried the Processor on that computer I worked for the summer and bought myself another computer. That stayed in my basement room for a few years until I could afford another(I still use the printer I bought with it).
Now I have a Diploma In Network Administration and Security and work for a company as their IT department. I run all the systems, Servers and make sure everything is spick and span here.
In conclusion I have 16 years of 'hacking' (per se) experiance and all my programming knowlege is self taught. I grow daily as do all people who love what they do. But total computer experance will add up to 21 years for me :D
Hope you liked my rant.
I'm 14… Always been interested in computers and the internet and always liked to mess around with things but always thought of hacking as something only a small few people were able to do…
Then while messing around I went into safe mode and changed around permissions and realized I now had access to all my brother's files…
Started learning HTML, now I'm very slowly learning more stuff (so slowly it's unbelievable, I'm constantly hyper and can never concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes)…
I still think of myself as a skiddie…
To answer the original question I got started a few months ago during the summer when I had enough time to actually learn stuff (now I'm just trying to forget as little as possible til next summer)
Well, I guess I can say that I 'really' started hacking when I found out about this website.. it has taught me a lot, but I think I was 11 when I got interested in hacking. I used to find ways to get around parental controls, reverse it on my parents, etc :P - After that I didn't really do much until I started messing around with my school, getting admin privelages and all that fun stuff.. from there I began using SK programs like Keyloggers to take over accounts on various sites, (At the time I had no idea how stupid it was). After that little phase, me and someone called Aciid_Nuk3r used to go around taking out minor sites and stuff. He later introduced me to this site, and I learned a lot from it.. he then thought he was too good to talk to me and we kind of fell out. But someone who used the alias Immence is someone who I looked up to and he had a huge impact on my view of hacking and made me want to learn and be as good as him, he refused to teach me anything though because he didn't want me getting in trouble like he did.. smart move lol. The guy really amazed me at the time how he would stop peoples computer fans and pretty much wreck their computers.. Guess I should get to the point, I basically liked the idea of getting into places that I shouldn't be and it sorta went from there. :P
I started hacking around 3 years ago with the website hackthissite and did some basic batch and VB programming. I took a break for a year or so as i learned to program in real languages and then applied that back to hacking. since i've gotten to college my hacking has picked up alot because i dont also have a snoopy parent around. I started hacking because i loved learning new things and never was happy with the way things worked. I always wanted to find a new way, a better way to do things.