What do you mean I can't hack that?

I first took an interest in information security when studying Journalism in London. Wikileaks has just made a splash thanks to Chelsea Manning and with her arrest it became clear that if I wanted to be a journalist, I had to find ways to keep sources safe. This led to an extended foray into infosec, through which I learned how to encrypt emails and later discovered Tails – the amnesiac incognito live Linux OS.

Were it not for the discovery of Stuxnet around the same time, infosec might have remained an auxillary interest. As it were, I had already followed the saga of Iran’s Nuclear Programme for some years after hearing about the country’s history at a peace conference. I was fascinated by the use of malware to achieve political objectives; and as I wrote my first dissertation on the representation of Iran’s Nuclear Programme in the media, I had plenty of excuses to read more about Stuxnet.

A growing interest

I continued this trend at Goldsmiths University, where I wrote about mass surveillance in the form of the UK’s Snooper’s Charter around the same time as Snowden exposed a similar disregard for human rights by the US.

Years later this interest had grown sufficiently strong to justify a second Bachelor’s Degree, this time in Information Security – as a way to transition to that industry.

I now work for an international company where I focus on incident response, threat hunting and automation. Outside of work I also have an interest in penetration testing.

What to expect

This section is a holding pen for everything loosely related to infosec; that includes scripts, experiments and perhaps some news and commentary.

The illustration is from a key reinstallation attack, which was the focus of my dissertation at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology(NTNU).