“The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed” — Stephen King; The Dark Tower. How I wish I could have been so resolute in my pursuit to be part of the blogosphere; a goal I’ve had on my check-list for so long, but a task that my ever prevailing procrastination has always disallowed. Never did it seem like I’d actually be writing this post.

I registered the domain name “null-security.com” in 2006 when I first started dabbling in the field of information security (in particular, web-hacking). A discussion took place between myself and a couple of other up-and-coming “hackers” on irc.2600.net #somerandomchannel, that it would be a something of a good idea to publish our thoughts, findings, and research for reasons that would be beneficial to ourselves and others in the form of a blog. In retrospect, it was a good idea. In retrospect, I should have started it then.

There is reason for my procrastination, but in all truth, it was more excuse than sound reason. You see, I’d originally started a blog not much earlier than the discussion took place; I had great plans and high hopes. At the time, I was pretty stuck into PHP coding and had created my own blogging platform–albeit, a very limited blogging platform–and wanted to continue developing that in conjunction with related blog posts.

Unfortunately I ran into some troubles with my host at the time (DreamHost) who didn’t like the idea of hosting anything remotely related to hacking. They removed my account without warning; wiping my profile and everything hosted by them- including my blogging platform. It was quite a blow and I never quite regained the motivation to start over. Backing up my code would have been a great idea, but hindsight is 20/20 and a hard lesson is a lesson learned.

With the hundreds of FOSS options for blogging, I don’t understand why I just didn’t pick one up and continue with that. I guess I always thought it best practice to develop your own blogging platform if a integral part of your blog was to be about development. Fortunately I’ve left that mentality behind and picked up WordPress as my platform. It’s so feature-rich it makes it difficult to warrant building your own.

Four years on from the tragic day my ~ directory was rm -rf’d by an over-security-zealous host, I’ve moved on from the trouble-making black hat I was, to a network engineer and security enthusiast. I’m currently employed by a large government body where I deal with a range of issues from building multi-layered switched networks, to applying relevant IDS rules, monitoring network traffic, and ensuring that the network is performing at an optimal state, even penetration testing in-house developed applications.

I still get excited when I find an unknown hole in a popular CMS. I still get excited when I get to play with new networking equipment. I still get excited when I get to plan and perform a penetration test at work; and get paid to do so.