Well, this is where I should try to explain why I’m writing this blog!

I have been working in IT for the last 20 something years. Mainly as a Project Manager or Business System Analyst but despite the fact that most of them where very challenging and rewarding, I was missing something.

My first computer was a Thompson TO7… a french little thing with Basic on a cartridge.. and after a few months (I was 10 yo at that time), I figured out (Although I don’t remember how!) how I could copy protected software. An easy version of a buffer overflow I guess!…

Here is the beast:

(Picture by Christophe Jaquet)

So long story short, I have always been interested by what was happening under the hood! I then had a Tandy 100EX and then more and more and more….. but I always tried to understand how these beats worked!…

When I was a few years older, I somehow managed to obtain a copy of Copywrite by Quaid Software . I felt like I was the king of the world! And started to make copies of anything I could find, even if I had no clue about their usage (DB2 etc…). Remember, I was still a kid at that time!

Years later, I continued writing small pieces of code (Pascal etc.) and then I had my first real job (Not exactly, it was a coop program): in 1998, working for an Internet Service Provider. This was a key element in my young life.

I discovered a brand new world and UNIX. Until then I was a DOS / Windows user only… Never touched a MAC… and bam… now my life was surrounded by FreeBSD, Linux, and SCO. I started to learn a few thing (Thanks RVA)… from basic commands to apache config… It was fun! Since then, I always had a few BSD or Linux machines around, making various things for fun.

Now I’m almost 45, times fly, but after all these years, I keep a strong appetite for what’s under the hood. And this is how I found OSCP from Offensive Security.

I started to download virtual machines and poke around but never had enough time to invest in this. Until I decided that enough is enough. I need to grow up!

In my current world, IT Security is a big thing and turning a passion into a job would be awesome… but aouch, I thought it would be easy… guess what… it’s not!

So this is why I’m writing this blog. I read a lot of them, learnt a lot and if I can, by writing this, help someone else, why not!

I will publish stories, VMs walkthroughs etc.. and hopefully one day my exam story!

Erik