🧑🏽‍💻 The Hacker Mindset
Tags: security, hacking, programming
Published: 2021-08-02 14:35:57

#### 🦠 If you’re not a security professional, I’ll bet right now you’re thinking of an evil dude in a hoodie doing bad things to computer systems like swiping your sensitive data to sell on the dark web.

### <br>

I’m going to say something we don’t usually say in our blog: ‘hacker’.

If you’re not a security professional, I’ll bet right now you’re thinking of an evil dude in a hoodie doing bad things to computer systems like swiping your sensitive data to sell on the dark web.

But that’s not a hacker; that’s a criminal.

Hackers break into computer systems to do good. How can I make that claim? Because at 15, I started my career doing something that could have gotten me into a lot of trouble.

Instead, the man who could have turned me in rechanneled my energy. I’m the staff security engineer for offensive security at Auth0, a [certified ethical hacker,](https://cert.eccouncil.org/certified-ethical-hacker.html) hold two [DEF CON black badges](https://defcon.org/html/links/dc-black-badge.html) and have 26 years of experience across IT and cybersecurity.

I’m sharing my story to help you understand how hackers think so you can put that mindset to work, helping secure your business. But first, a bit of context via a brief history of hacking.

![Brief History](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/3Cu6Hhk4uxBk10a168mv7g/b7d9b0fcd37582dd087327574361ff8b/WhatIs_Broken_Auth_sep-2)

## Brief History: Why ‘Hacker’ Is an Overloaded Word

Reading this post on your smartphone or personal computer? You can thank hackers and the phone phreaks who inspired them.

(_What follows is a quick summary of the history. For more details, check out the documentary “[The Secret History of Hacking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_History_of_Hacking)”._)

In the 1960s and 1970s, global telecommunications relied on a series of tones to connect calls — and you could replicate the tones with a toy whistle included in a box of Captain Crunch cereal (or sing them if you had perfect pitch). Phone phreakers freely shared knowledge and did some social engineering by talking their way into trunk code access or even walking away with phone company technical manuals, says “The Secret History of Hacking”.

By 1971, they’d shared knowledge with an [Esquire reporter](https://www.ckts.info/downloads/articles/Esquire%20Magazine%20October%201971%20-%20Secrets%20Of%20The%20Little%20Blue%20Box.pdf) and businessmen, stockbrokers, autodealers, and more or less anybody who wanted to make free long distance calls could phreak. This led to jail time for several phreakers but also inspired two college kids: Stephan Wozniak and Steve Jobs, who would go on to start Apple Computing.

At this time, “hacker” still meant someone who was super-curious about computers, how they worked, and how to make them do unexpected things like produce color on TV monitors — and they shared that information with each other freely because that sharing and exploration was the root of the hacker ethos.

Wozniak’s exploration was also the root of the personal computer. He built one in his bedroom, and Jobs secured a deal for $50,000 for Apple Computing. Wozniak and Jobs went from sharing information freely to having to focus on creating a product (there’s a bit more here, but go check out the documentary for more detail).

As computing became more about business, what was originally considered teenage pranks started being taken seriously as criminal offenses. The meaning of hacker changed (about the same time as Hollywood came out with the hacker movie “[WarGames](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames).”)

But the thing is that the internet as we know it was based on sharing information. This means that security and, even later, privacy have been bolted on. All of the cool things that we can do with computers today harken back to the original curiosity and exploration of hackers and phone phreakers.

While this allows bad actors to pull off attacks like ransomware or account takeovers using “hackerlike” behaviors, there are people like me using their hacker skills to do good. They’re known as ethical hackers.

### What is ethical hacking?

Ethical hacking is looking for vulnerabilities within systems, applications, and companies within legally agreed upon constraints with the intent of sharing your findings with the company to make the system or app better — hacking for good —but also for street cred. 

More on that after I tell you how I almost became a criminal.


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