Ela grew up in East Germany during the 1980s, where they were introduced to computers and electronics at a young age. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ela became deeply involved in the hacker scene, joining the Chaos Computer Club, attending early DEFCONs, and witnessing the merging of East and West German hacker cultures. Ela made the transition into professional security work, dealing with APT investigations, incident response, and eventually moving into security architecture and management roles. It's a fantastic conversation with a ton of unique lessons and ideas.
Hacker History sits down with Marc Boorshtein, we learn of his journey from tinkering with Doom shareware as a kid and getting free hardware from his Dad. Marc tells us about the early days of LDAP and Kerberos to modern Kubernetes, he shares war stories about managing critical infrastructure and accidentally shutting down a company's Japanese manufacturing for a weekend. It's a great episode.
Hacker History sits down with Cyberpunk Librarian. We hear about his early years of Commodore 64 and BBS, the usual getting in trouble in school and making computers do whatever they want. We then get to learn about the journey of Cyberpunk Librarian as an actual librarian. You're going to learn more about how libraries than you knew you wanted to know. We finish this one up with some real advice on what you can do to help your local library out. It's a great story and amazing journey.
Hacker History sits down with Johnny Xmas. Johnny tells us about his journey into the world of hacking and tech, starting from his childhood, he discusses taking things apart (like a wall outlet), putting them back together, typewriters, libraries and getting into plenty of trouble in high school, and finally landing in music school. It's an amazing story with some great history.
Hacker History sits down with The Gibson. We cover how Gibson got to where he is today. We start out hearing of Gibson's early hacker days, then he decides to get out of the hacker scene for a while. But Gibson is drawn back in, and start doing some amazing world changing work. We hear about hackers.town, Veilid, and more. It's a great story from someone doing amazing work.
Hacker History sits down with Wade Wells. Wade sits on the board of BSides San Diego and has an amazing journey that got him there. Wade recounts how he started out at In-N-Out Burgers and made his way into security. Every step of the way he leveled up and now is an amazing community member who gives back consistently. We hit on topics of MSPs, public speaking, meetups, building teams, and a lot of fun security stories. It's a lot of fun.
Hacker History sits down with Dana Morrison and hears his story into tech. Dana starts out with a Commodore 64 and writes a war dialer as one of the first projects. He starts out with a BBS and eventually hacks into his school's BBS system. Dana goes to college as a theology major and ends up running IT for a school. Nothing brings out the hacker mindset like keeping a school's computers running. We hear about Dana using OSINT to figure out a drop shipping scam only to find out the FBI wasn't interested in the details. We finish up with a lot of great advice for anyone in tech, both old and new. It's a great conversation with a lot of fun stories!
Hacker History sits down with Jindrich Krasek. We hear about how Jindrich's journey started out as a medical researcher. He had to hack a machine he was using to make it work in new ways, and that experience hooked him as a hacker. He starts out with social engineering to get his foot in the door. He eventually find himself doing IT at medical companies that was his foot in the door. The movie Hackers was an inspiration, and eventually Jindrich found himself in the SOC. This then led to Jindrich calling himself a "security data scientist" before using data was as popular as it is today.
Hacker History sits down with HD Moore. We hear about his story when he was young and making hardware work that probably shouldn't have worked. His shenanigans in the days of IRC and warez, and how that led its way into the Metasploit project. The impact of Metasploit cannot be understated. The world in the early 2000's was nothing like it is today. It's a great conversation that covers a ton of ground.