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.

People commonly rhetorically excuse mistakes of youth. Even today at 36, I was a terrible person for what I did. I regret it eternally. It should be imposed the cost you have made on the world. I am still haunted, but at peace with now. That’s the proper response. Not indemnity.

(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.