Intro
Hey nerd, not sure how you found my blog but here we are. Two weirdos staring eye to eye wondering what to say next. Well let me start.
I’m a nerd, a big. fucking. nerd. I guess that makes two of us if you’re still reading this. Like every good ADHD kid, I tend to hyperfocus on stuff. But there’s a catch, I’m a Jack of all trades but master of none. I start projects, learn enough to get dangerous and then toss it aside for the next cool thing. Does that make me a picture perfect zoomer? I’ll let you be the judge 🤷
Now I’m already hearing you screeching “but you gotta have some specific interest?! You can’t know a bit about everything!!!” and you’d be right. I currently tend to gravitate towards three “fields” in particular.
Cybersecurity
So I never really went to school for this. TL;DR, after some bad life choices, I ended up welding for a living. More precisely, I was a sanitary stainless guy which meant I used to build and install medical, food and brewing equipment.
After working for roughly 7 years in that field, I quickly realized that my body would essentially be turned to mush if I kept on going. “But there’s OSHA to protect you!!!”, yeah right. Like your boss is gonna ask you to take care of your body when you’re doing shutdown work and every hour that passes costs your client $50k+.
Alright, enough rambling. So during all of my time as a welder I happened to grow a passion for Cybersecurity. I would literally finish my shift and hop straight onto either Tryhackme or Hackthebox. On my weekends, I participated in as many CTFs as I could because… I enjoyed it! I genuinely did and for as long as I can remember they were the events I looked forward to and that kept me going despite my shit job.
Fast forward a while, I decided to call it quits. Started looking for Tech Support jobs at a few companies and ended up landing one at an “AI powered search” company (yeah, yeah, buzzwords but you get the idea). Turns out welders are paid less than you’d think where I live so my pay barely took a hit. After a year of actually enjoying what I did for a living and slowly gaining my mental health back, a neat opportunity was presented to me. An internal CTF created by the Offensive Security team! Ah! Just what I was used to. After grinding at it for a day I managed to solve all challenges and ended up with first place.
Don’t get me wrong, I know there’s a big difference between CTFs and IRL pentests/red teams but my knowledge was enough for me to fake it ’til I made it. And fake it I did! While working in the Offensive Security team, I discovered I had a knack for incident management and response.
After taking care of a few of them, learning the ropes of DFIR and learning about what corporate culture is (turns out not everyone can tolerate some fucking swearing all the time).
This brings us to today where I currently occupy the role of Lead SOC Analyst at the company at which I was a “mere” Tech Support agent 3 years ago. Now some of you weirdos may be telling yourself “hurdurr you’ve only been working in the field for a few years, who do you think you are writing blogposts about Cybersecurity?”.
I’m not writing this to establish as an expert in the field. I would even, myself, advise to not take what’s on this website too seriously. I may goof up from time to time and I’ll be the first to admit it. What I am, however, is someone who is fucking passionate about his work. And I’ll make sure to make some of that shine through these shitbag blogposts :)
Ham Radio
So now I’ve turned a passion into work. Obviously, because we can’t have good things in life, this meant this was no longer a hobbie. And I needed a hobbie. This is when I discovered the absolute ✨ joys ✨ of Ham radio. Although super cool, it’s a pretty fucking big money pit so my setup is still fairly jank.
I won’t go into my setup here because the intro is already getting a little long but if you’re curious to see my setup I encourage you to go see my QRZ page VA2CJX.
Homelab stuff
So obviously Ham radio wasn’t a big enough of a moneypit, I had to build myself a fancy pants homelab! And by fancy pants I mean three almost-not garbage computer glued together with wishful thinking.
I’ll get into the details in another blogpost (if I remember to make one) but it currently runs:
- An HA k3s cluster (the one that serves this website)
- Some jank sanboxes for malware analysis purposes
And is all built relying on Proxmox (my beloved).
