Hacking

For some reason I’ve always been interested in finding out how things work. Already as a child, I liked to look at the inner workings of technical devices and especially computers have always fascinated me. We got our first computer rather late, and I can’t say, that I had a wide range of different computers available or played around with a lot of different machines as a kid. But from the moment my family did get our first computer, I was somehow responsible for making it run and keeping it that way. Since my family has never been as interested in such things as me, our home computers that were used by everyone have always been MS Windows machines.

During my studies (electrical engineering) I finally bought my first own laptop and the first thing I did was getting rid of Windows and installing a Linux distribution. I don’t recall which the first distribution was, but by now it have been quite a few over the years. Right now I’m running Arch Linux.

What came with using Linux was to play around with the set up, configuring programs, dealing with all sorts of problems, and all that fun stuff. I enjoy tweaking my setup to make it work they way I like it. This is one aspect that I consider as Hacking.

A while back, I decided that I would try to become a Linux Foundation Certified Systems Administrator and passed the exam for that in January of 2023.

Since I believe computers are much better at doing repetitive tasks over and over again than humans, I like to automate everything that can be automated. I’m a big fan of all the “XYZ as Code” paradigms (like Infrastructure as Code, Documentation as Code, etc.) and the whole DevOps movement. That’s way I’ve been looking into that more and more for the last year or so (I’m writing this in January of 2023). Some of the tools/programs I’ve been playing around with to become more familiar with them are:

• Jenkins
• Ansible
• Vagrant
• Docker
• Podman
• Kubernetes

I believe learning about such tools and tinkering around with them is also a form of hacking.

Professionally, I’ve been programming different types of microcontrollers since 2011. The go to language for that is mainly C and sometimes C++. Every once in a while some additional scripts are necessary for which I like to use Python or Bash. I use all these languages for private projects as well. And I am a big fan of Git to version control most of the projects I work on.

Other topics I have looked into every once in a while when I find the time to do so are machine learning, data science, website hacking, and penetration testing. I guess the last two would be what most people have in mind when it comes to hacking. Unfortunately, my time is limited and I can’t to everything. So these topics do interest me, but so far I didn’t get into them deeply. I just played around a little bit.

To sum it up. For me Hacking consists of two distinct but closely related things. On the one hand it’s about finding out how things work and making them work the way I want them to, on the other hand it’s about finding bugs in websites and applications that could potentially be exploited by people with bad intentions. I plan on writing about both of these sides of hacking here.

While I have some personal notes about fixing my own problems, they are not really written in a way to be released for the public. But the idea is to fix that and publish write ups that hopefully are helpful to others with similar problems. When it comes to website hacking, so far I’m just studying the subject, but once I’m actually into it, I plan on publishing my experiences here as well. Just please be patient with me.

Take care,
Andreas