Thread by @SwiftOnSecurity

Tomorrow is the 10-year anniversary of SwiftOnSecurity.

Here’s the story. Which includes my story. I tell myself they are not the same. Someday they won’t. There will be a time I walk away. I can’t live up to this and won’t try. 🧵

This is not important. I have tweeted parts before and then deleted others. There’s no reveal. There no product line. Just looking back and what happened and what it meant.

It will probably be the last time I talk about this in detail.

Nothing is pre-written. I’m just posting.

My dad was a trained aerospace engineer turned IT manager and IC for CRM/BI. My mother was a childhood speech pathologist.

I was raised in Silicon Valley and grew up with computers. My dad ran a web hosting/development side business so I had a T1 and spare hardware. In my room.

Had hardware and some assistance but my father is… distant. So I did not get much or ever ask for help. I started off having to build machines from parts on the family room carpet and then get DOS running, for games like Doom and Lemmings and Putt-Putt. Later Win3.1 confused me.

(Note I was literally born in 1989 that is not a joke)
My first online interaction was on my dad’s machine using newsgroups for some reason. Eventually I got it on my PC. Don’t remember any details. But my dad got hundreds of MSDN disks so I always had server and Microsoft software

Yes I was like 9 with a T1 and and MSDN subscription I promise you don’t get as fucked as me without the universe conspiring. If you don’t know about these go look them up it’s how you’d get gigabytes of test software and keys before broadband.
Anyway I graduated to 95 then XP.

(My PC in 1999 with cat Blanca)
Anyway I was also a broken kid who would have absolutely crashed and burned more if I was not so lucky to grow up in a household with involved parent and ability to pay for therapy. We were upper-middle but I always just got used hardware parts.

My dad’s interest as an engineer meant a workbench where I would take apart VCRs and cut through plastic electronics with a soldering iron. I eventually repurposed a RC car on foam packaging + glued propeller as a RC boat.

Never told anyone any of this. I’m using you to dump. 🤷‍♀️

https://twitter.com/JustWantToQ1/status/1777509307556229193

I had ongoing issues in schooling. I was transferred to a magnet middle school with a crazy daily period of 30 eMacs. Learned Office then teacher left & rest of year we did whatever. Unfiltered internet. That Dino game. StickDeath was huge. Absolute anarchy of technical commune.

Skipping back: Due to what I had at home I started in elementary with FrontPage 97, Microsoft’s discontinued website editor with crazy sitemap interface.
My dad provisioned website for me. I posted pics of animals and split them by pages. My internet was very fast so it was easy.

I progressed to DreamWeaver. (Templates >>> CMS). I created one of the most popular gaming tips websites for an MMO.
And I complained my middle school website sucked. They let me take it over as a weekly class period in the office. I rebuilt it. This was me:
web.archive.org/web/2004041721…

(Note the site looked way tighter natively in contemporary browsers.)
Also note: I never lie except when it’s obvious joke or to trivially misdirect on who I am. I learned a long time ago I’m not good enough to track the endless tree of states that lying creates so I just don’t.

Anyway I was still a broken kid but I got cool local Silicon Valley high school. Went through electronic accommodations from PDA to Toshiba M3500 XP tablet. I was reading ComputerWorld when I was bored in class because disruptive kids ran everything. I’m a loser whatever I know.

Had a eMac lab in the library. Befriended the school admin, Adrian. Eventually it was a daily period where I helped him run things, based on Windows Server and such. I even accompanied him offsite to buy stuff but was 100% above-board. Zero weird stuff ever. An Apprentice. Lucky.

It gets way weirder from here trust me. And I’m skipping tons of shit too like the elementary school Mac lab where I had some magic touch to help kids in a drawing program save stuff or in middle school with teacher MacBook to TV adaptors.
Don’t care? Mute the thread.
Continuing:

Was great school. I took one of the last Photography high school electives ever from a veteran photog where our film camera’s only electronic was an exposure meter and we developed our own film darkroom. Egg smell. Photoshop. VW pic in this I took in that class. Privileged, yes.

https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/734204860405407749

I had ongoing issue that were my own inadequacy. I transferred to a college program where I took half college, half high school classes at SJCC.
There, I made one of the greatest mistakes in my life. I didn’t understand the context for or appreciate what I had. I was a fool.

Was top performer but cruel to teachers who I felt didn’t match up. Then I took the state test – and instead of answering – I used bubble scantron to make bit art instead of test.
I am a bad person. Admin of the program said it would hurt them. I was called to the Superintendent.

(It was a state test for statical scoring for funding in a small program so it was bad. I may be too hard on myself. But I wish I could go back.)
Anyway I failed out of the best opportunity of my life and became a recluse doing remote education workbooks I could do in 10 minutes.

I don’t have much memory of or objective judgement on my status but one day I was basically kidnapped and sent to a full-time rehabilitation program in Utah, mostly drug addicted teens and oppositional mental disorders. It was a nice place that tried. I cried every day for a year

Every day I just had my crying time in a bathroom or in bed silently. I knew I was a failure but also resented my parents.
Now, I don’t think about it. We don’t mention it. Maybe it helped. Lucked out it was absolutely one of the nicer ones. Every other person had horrors.

Troubled teens can be sent to this thing called “wilderness” where they strand you in a wooded area with sadistic psychos and at night you get locked into a sleeping bag. One person told me they broke their arm on purpose and after hospital were sent back. Anyway. Moving on.

On that topic, looking back. Therapy is a great scoped treatment for certain issues. I eventually ended up at one of the most accomplished and published psychologists in the area. They were great. Outside medication it didn’t help. I am not fixed by talking. That’s my truth.

I have a book-length story just in that year of living on a ranch tending to cows and horses before breakfast but skipping over to tell notables. This is the GED I earned meanwhile. In Utah. Like I said.
If you want to hire me I’ll be happy to show you I “completed high school.”

The thing about 17 is a year is forever. But not as long as summer break in kindergarten. Yet it is a long time. I learned to care for cows. I learned to ride and interact with horses. Muck stalls. Sports. Be manual labor and not complain.
(Again for many ppl it’s a nightmare)

Every one of these posts I could write entire blog or book about but you don’t have time for that so we’ll move on. And I did cry every single day I was there. When arrived back, my childhood home was no longer. My bed was alien. Unease. But I had finished school. Time for a job.

Shit I didn’t even mention being on the robotics team and what happened. Again, I’m leaving a lot out.
Retrospective: I had always been technical because in those days to pursue tech hobbies you had to be. Shit broke all the time. Nothing was compatible. I was forged in the fire.

My first forum was N64CC, because I loved the GameShark and wanted codes and advice. Became a social pub for me.
And that’s where I learned about security. The capability and impunity in those days was extreme for the skilled. I got to experience that. Thanks to a guy named Viper

The forums were some PHP bulletin board software. It was the 90s and sucked but it worked.
Occasionally a guy named Viper would hack the site and do shit. The admin’s admitted they couldn’t do anything. Viper was exploiting the code directly. Luckily wasn’t bad just annoyance.

So at a young age I was exposed to the idea of web vulnerabilities and 0days and the impunity they allowed bad actors. Wish I could thank Viper someday. They did it for the lulz, not malicious. There was no ransomware back then. Hacking was pure. It was humans and a machine.

Hacking at its absolute purest is demonstration of mastery. That’s it. Just like Tony Hawk doing 900’s. It was an audience in the zone, not disrupting normies. You could so you did.
I was also on IRC, another thing I won’t dive into for brevity. I miss those days of ignorance.

https://twitter.com/minitru/status/1777908432340684832

Then joined TechTV/G4 forums and found my experience and outlook useful. I’ve always had to fix everything myself. And that taught me about computers. About Windows. Sorta. As a fool I still am.
So it was not a stretch to be…useful. To those lacking all but advice. I excelled.

Oh yeah I forgot to mention the reason I was failing at highschool is I was addicted to editing Wikipedia I’m still a top-1000 account and built a part of some tooling still in use today.
I failed school because I just read the encyclopedia instead. My life is so fucking dumb.

I arrive back home actually 17. And because we’re being honest, my dad helped get me my first job as L1 helpdesk contractor for 2 months. I still had to interview and impress the manager. The start date was 1 day before I turned 18. The agency lied about my birthday to get me in.

The job was a temp supporting a temporary call center staffed by temps for an irregular business event. Setup and ghost machines from floppy, be L1 tech support, plug the mouse back in if they unplug it accidentally. Alongside like 4 other temps? They were a gamut of… skills.

Also: Photos from residental treatment facility. Long story why I have them. First is the bottle room where before breaskfast every day you filled nipple bottles for calves in the field. That's my building, 22 double bunks. Other house other gender. Utah is fucking beautiful btw

Eventually get car. Grandma stopped driving. 1991 Honda Accord. It would kill me and save me later in story. This is a view from the Lick Observatory, greatest driving experience I've ever had if you're in the SF Bay Area. With my first paychecks I bought a DSLR camera and drove.

I loved photography at a young age. Even as a child I hated myself. And I figured out the best way to never be in front of a camera, is to be behind it. There are almost no photos of me. Latest is probably my employee badge photo.
I wanted to erase myself from the world. So I did

At my temp job I am continually retained as other temps are let go. I stay as a temp for like a year and am the only one left. They hit some time limit and hired me full-time as staff. I would later accidentally delete the HR person’s AD account that walked me through paperwork.

Shortly after that, they announce they are closing the west coast HQ. I won’t explain what that means. Everyone is told: We will pay to move you if you want. Deadline 2 months. I don’t sign up. This is all I know. But I get the idea. I have done this before. I have left my world.

I tell my parents I’m not doing it. But one day at 19 I decide I have no future in Silicon Valley. I will never own a home. I’ll be a lessor of a room, a bed. Like I was before in Utah.
I walk into the Director’s office. I tell them I’m going.
And I tell my parents that night.

As a preview, I fly out to my new home and supervisor. On the flight I talk extensively with my seatmate. They ask if I want lunch with them when we land. I decline, saying I already have a car picking me up.

I realize years later they were flirting with me.

My life is just constant L’s interspersed with unlikely career advancement.

On my last day in California I am packing my 1991 Accord full of everything I would take. I would drive thousands of miles. I was upset and bristly to a final doctor appointment I had. I came back rather than immediately go on. I sat on my bed. And I cried the hardest I ever have

What had I done. I am 19. I will have nothing. I don’t know how to be an adult. It will just be me. I am a sheltered fool.
I give a final goodbye to my family, feeling terrible for my bruskness. I get in my 1991 Accord. With everything I have. And I drive. Across the horizon.

I remember transiting through Los Angeles by the sudden low smog layer. I took pictures and videos of my journey. Which I have lost forever due to misplaced confidence and my own arrogance. A part of me is missing. It takes days. My first stay in hotels alone. Waypoints to a dawn

I eventually arrive in the metro area on Cold War highways. I arrive in the apartment complex. I go to the office. I unlock my apartment and walk into the irrevocable future.
My mom thoughtfully included a basic folding chair, which I bring up. I sit and cry. What had I done.

I know it seems like I cry a lot in this but now I don’t and miss being able to emote.

Decided I can’t bore endless events so here’s the accelerated timeline:
I work in Helpdesk roles for 10 years+in new home. I thought I was my job title. I had no hope of explaining to new companies, so I just stayed. I increasingly do security stuff,
January 2014 changes my life.

In January 2014 I suffer a car crash and traumatic brain injury. My 2001* Accord ends up tumbling down embankment. My head crushed against the inside to a retention pond, almost drowning me. I am medivac’d to a tier-1 stoke hospital. And I do not create new memories for 3+ days.

My body has lacerations I see every day in morning. I suffer traumatic brain trauma, can’t really describe. Half my facial nerves are shot and droop. My left eye is cross-eyed. I can barely walk. Likely never drive again. Don’t know if I even know anything. Could never recover.

Get to local physical therapy place after parents flew in, but beyond walking no progress. I do not deny my luck or ascribe to myself. I opt not to know my IQ score. And I am left with an abundance of time of ponderance. I am 24. Can I work? Do I know anything? What is left?

I get evaluated for a disability services pass because I can’t drive. Every day I get moved around on a group bus, seeing other lives. Talking to them for hours across rides and therapies. I met a lot of teens brain damaged from motorcycles. I’ve commented before on their tragedy

I talk to an emergency response person who was there. They said if my car was any older I’d have been dead. If my car was much newer, I’d have maybe opened the door and walked away. That’s all they saw. All the time. You lived or died. It was the machine that weighed the scale.

In my time off from work I need to figure out if I know anything. I join a security forum and prodigiously post. One day Heartbleed arrives. I used Twitter since 2007. I had experience in one-day novelty accounts. So I made SwiftOnSecurity. I cringe at parody. Fact, not intent.

I knew not a lot past music tracks, no opinion she was dumb. Respected the lyrical finesse. A time of crap jokes about her open-hearted nature, thus HeartBleed.
And I made a few heartbleed posts. On premise Taylor Swift was secretly 100% legitimately a cybersecurity expert.

Something I tried to make clear was the joke was never she was dumb. A bimbo played to the crowd. The conceit was, why would you doubt she’s this smart? She’s got time. She’s intelligent. She’s good with language. I wouldn’t swear or post during appearances. Tried to be earnest.

I was not a Taylor Swift fan before this. I was not a swiftie. It was a dumb cringe joke for a day, but not in anyway meant to be dismissive. But.
It turns out, she is truly smart as fuck? She is a master of her craft. Accomplished and would only become more so. What had I done.

I’ll be honest, parodic Twitter culture of 2014 is somewhat alien today. There was no seriousness. Novelty accounts were huge. There was no risk of misunderstanding. My original name was “InfoSec Taylor Swift.”
Would that fly today? Absolutely not. It’s cringe. That is history.

The car crash had probably made me dumber, but it gave me this driving compulsion to write in styles of formal indulgence. And I wanted to know, did I even know all the words? So past the dumb jokes I embarked on an AI doom theme.
Cringe? Not 2015. Judge me. That’s the story.

I don’t expect you to today respect me from 2015 but I’m at least going to explain. This is not my professional identity it’s something I use to foster conversation and shitpost. I’ve been cringe. But I was earnest. Do you want the truth or a lie. I can be a liar if you prefer.

I realized later “being” SwiftOnSecurity was my hope. It was the outlay that I could ever be respected. That I could ever work in security. That I could be beautiful.
It was a vehicle for fantasy. It was something I could desperately inhabit. It was a lie. A lie for an ugly duck.

Skipping a bunch, I decided to kill myself. I was a misshapen ugly fool. I buy a shotgun shipped to a local FFL dealer. I picked out a reclusive field near my work. I bought a tarp to make cleanup easier. I get a shotgun carry bag, for some reason.
And then at work I get a call.

Somehow, my billing address got automatically filled in as California, maybe due to browser extension. While my shipping address was my new state.
They called me. In my cube. They asked me what to do. I’m an agnostic. But I took it as a sign. I was wrong.

I cancelled the order.

It was too late to cancel the shotgun bag. I get it and put it in my car trunk, unsure what to do.
On a visit my mom asks what it is. I don’t remember what I said. It was a lie.
I threw it away sometime later.

As a child, you need someone to tell you to go on. To live. But as an adult it’s just you. Your thoughts. A thousand miles from anchor. You have to decide. Continually, in adversity. I decided not to continue – but the universe intervened.
And that day I decided to live.

I’m skipping over incredible amounts of my life here. Professional, personal. Something I want to highlight is Sysmon, by @markrussinovich. It changed my life. It helped saved it. Because when I decided to live, it was the springboard. I’ll explain shortly.

Windows is a General Purpose Operating System designed for extensibility and user changes in a time before modern viruses. It is an incredible system. It Won. But there are hundreds, thousands of way to “extend” it built on innocence that made it, that malicious programs exploit.

How do you monitor this? Well you mostly Don’t. Sorta. Until Mark released Sysmon, which could real-time audit sensitive areas in the OS much more powerful than before. Problem was, it’s a blank slate requiring endless hours and knowledge to leverage into monitoring an enterprise

Again skipping insane amounts of my professional life, I knew the power of these file locations and registry areas. Not just security, but Helpdesk. Same areas viruses use, random programs fuck shit up.
So. I decided to be the first. To make Sysmon work. (Why I’m ~famous btw)

I publish the only comprehensive system-wide configuration for Sysmon. It has been recommended by training and books and governments as a basis for security.
When I released it I had a choice. Under my name as a nobody for career advancement. Or SwiftOnSecurity, for popularity.

At that time I was planning to not exist. I did not matter. What was important was sharing what I had made. Not my name. So I created a SwiftOnSecurity GitHub. And I published it.
@markrussinovich would later highlight it in presentations on using Sysmon.

github.com/SwiftOnSecurit…

@markrussinovich sysmon-config is now the basis for all public Sysmon configurations (which have superseded it) and multiple commercial product rulesets, including one my employer pays for. I know because it includes a mistake I made.
I’m honored. But nobody will ever know my name. I chose that.

@markrussinovich Just like in photographs. Like in my tools and edits for Wikipedia. My contributions to Windows security monitoring. My personality here. I decided to erase myself from the world. I decided to not exist. And I did it. I won.
I’m okay with that, now. It is its own sort of freedom.

I would later miraculously mostly? recover from my brain injury, mostly the nerves. I can now see straight. My face works 99% like before. They said it was due to my age, they didn’t want to promise anything. If 48 and you get hit in the head you’re prob just fucked forever sry🤷‍♀️

If you talk to me, you may know there is something wrong. Humans are like that. The face is an organ of impossible truth to the visual cortex. You will notice the side with the ever subtle droop. My slight slur of words you can’t describe.
I’m branded. But I lived. I chose to.

I was recently prompted to comment on influencers. I don’t. It’s fine done right. A few partners know who I am because I thought they were interesting, but I do not own their products in my role.
I’m just. I’m just a person. A handful of coworkers know but they do not tell people

I’m concerned many do not understand ‘SwiftOnSecurity’ is not a professional identity or alias. It’s not a resentful illicit insider.
It’s an escape I’m privileged to have autonomy to post in about certain things most don’t.
I cannot be this. That’s okay. It’s good. I’m glad.

Near home stretch. I decided to live. I decided my life wasn’t good enough. It was time to be aggressive. I started applying to places. I flew to Microsoft for interview. I’m glad didn’t get was not right role but so privileged to visit I’m so glad. Core memory. (Ft @film_girl❤️)

@film_girl Yeah that’s right I haven’t just been making shit up this whole time it’s wild getting told someone’s actual life story not a version with sexy eternal vampires.

@film_girl Tangent: You have likely noticed I’m occasionally… enthusiastic about employing obtuse sentence constructions and vocabulary.
Would you be surprised to find out this started only after I got hit in the head really hard when I was 24? I was good at writing. But I didn’t enjoy it.

@film_girl After suffering a traumatic brain injury and on leave from work in therapy, I had sudden drive to test my language skills. To tell stories. If I even knew anything anymore was in doubt, so beyond literal compulsion – it was a good self-diagnostic. So I readily indulged it.

I was invited to interview at a high-profile philanthropy in New York, before Microsoft. I ace the telephone interviews, where I give advice on fixing WinUpdate errors on servers they were having. I’m flown out to NY. My first experience like that. First in NY. Before Christmas.

I walk New York down to Rockefeller Center, with the big Christmas tree. The ice rink. The decorations. I’m ecstatic. My dreams are coming true. I am on my own in a strange city. But like I’ve been before. I am flushed with anxiety. But here I am, now. I lived. I lived for this.

Wake up on the day of the interview in the fancy hotel. I walk out on the balcony (images are archived too lazy now) and hear New York. And then I go into the bathroom, confused. I throw up.
I’m not pregnant. I finally understand that trope of anxiety is not a joke. I get ready.

I’m brought over to one office, and had lunch. This is the first time I had ever seen the lives of those people outside a minor sales office. Outside a call center. Outside a flailing 1950’s office park. Oh my god. Oh my god. I am in my business formal wear, sweating. A mess.

Everybody is great. Fantastic. Everything is amazing. I’m brought to other office. Everything is new, everything is premium. A small group that needed security and IT guidance. A perfect fit. I do successive interviews. But I come to understand. There had been a misunderstanding.

I was not ready to move to New York. I had no idea about money, I quoted them a salary of like 90k. I was naive. I was not ready. I was uneasy. A young striver in a world of old money. Who wasn’t fully there. Maybe. I shake hands and thanked them. And was chauffeured back hotel.

I want to make clear I still hold on utmost regard my primary contact there. That experience changed my life forever. It was the launching board of confidence later. They did _nothing_ wrong. But I knew, getting on the plane back, this was not my salvation. I get the call later.

This thread is long and meandering - I didn’t plan it. I don’t talk about experiences or job as I’ve shared over years and don’t want another retelling. After 11 years in IT, I’m hired as a Security Engineer in 2018. I’m now 35. I lived.
I’m going to leave it there now. Thank you