With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

When you log into a root user (superuser for non-technical folks) on most linux distributions, especially older ones, it hits you with the following message:

We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local System
Administrator. It usually boils down to these three things:

    #1) Respect the privacy of others.
    #2) Think before you type.
    #3) With great power comes great responsibility.

root's password:

When I was in my older teenage years I got into “hacking“. I went to DEFCON (the biggest hacking conference in the world) when I was 17 (with my mom lol, she was the only one that would go with me). I kind of fell in love with the badge challenge, decompiling the code off of the PCB they give you as a conference badge and finding clues to their challenges. Spent countless hours in the lockpicking village. Bought a wifi pineapple that I had fun using on my highschool friends. Went to tons of talks Learned how to use a VPN. Opsec. Spent a little too much time in certain IRC servers. I am capable, but compared to some of the security folks I know, no means “good“ at it.

One interesting thing is that I think the most common types of hacks have nothing to do with computers at all. Computers give you the leverage a lot of the time, but more often than not the highest ROI is exploiting social loopholes to get ahead in life.

The thing with hackers is that it’s up to them whether they use their powers for good or evil. Integrity is something you can’t teach, and oftentimes with all of that power people will let it get to them that they can do anything. I haven’t seen this play out a lot, but I have seen it play out a few times where people who are very good at these things go down a bad path.

There’s a line to everything, starting and ending with putting others in harms way, and it’s important to know where it is. With great power comes great responsibility.