My Linux Journey
Please note that this is a personal story and the things I did as a kid were not ethical and I do not condone them. This is just a story of how I got into Linux and programming.
My interest in Linux started around 2010 when I first booted up PC Linux OS stored on one of those CDs you could get from computer enthusiast magazines. I was gifted the magazine by a friend of a neighbour (the one whose Wi-Fi I would hack) who had been a collector. The PC Linux OS at that time would have been the one released around 2007. I was very intrigued by it as it gave this sci-fi vibes. I would open the terminal and type a bunch of commands and of course it would error out. I ran this in a VM, but I lost interest after a while.
It wasn’t until a few years later on that I really got interested in Linux when I was introduced to Backtrack 4 (a penetration testing distro that has since been replaced by Kali Linux). I was drawn to backtrack as I ventured out to hack my neighbours internet (please don’t judge me). I was compelled to hack as a recent immigrant kid I couldn’t afford internet. Using my other neighbour’s across the road. I downloaded the resources I needed to understand how to actually hack WI-FI. At this point in time I had been very well aware of cybercrime and for some reason it looks cool (again I was a kid here, I wouldn’t say this today). I use to live in Melbourne after we first landed in Australia, while I was there I came across a documentary which aired on ABC called Web Warriors 2.0 back in 2009. The documentary explored the world of blackhat hacking and how hackers get into systems for malicious purposes and for fun. This fascinated me to the point when I got to Brisbane I would often daydream about becoming a hacker. Back in Melbourne I had already fiddled around with computers and probably knew a lot about them compared to the average person. This foundation is important to my later stages when we moved to Brisbane.
When we moved to Brisbane I had two directions I could take with my fascination with computers. I wanted to play video games, but the hobby felt out of reach for me as video games were quite expensive for me. The other direction was hacking as a hobby but not necessarily to wreak havoc but rather out of curiosity.
After downloading a handbook from some ethical hacking website the first thing I was taught is that if you want to be a good hacker one must learn Linux as Mac or Windows make the task harder. Besides a need to know how to use Linux was the need to learn programming. So I picked up C++. I began with C++ Primer 5th edition. I ended reading the book almost to the end. I ended up enjoying programming more than I would enjoy hacking.
So I already said internet was expensive for me. At this stage I was mostly getting stuff downloaded from my neighbour’s across the road. They happen to be from the same country as me. So they were cool with me using their internet. They didn’t have Wi-Fi, so I physically had to come over. Some months would pass, and I’d learn about Aircrack-ng suite which after many trials and errors I was able to crack the WEP key of my other neighbour’s Wi-Fi.
As a kid I wasn’t very good with secrets. I had actually initially asked him for his Wi-Fi password, but he would refuse. When his bill was high he managed to put two and two together and figured out I was the culprit. He was pissed and talked to my mum about it. I was in heaps of trouble but people were rather impressed that I was able to pull it off.
Hacking, coding, IRC, and mischief
I was now rocking backtrack 4 and mostly using prepaid internet dongles to get the internet. We still had no actual internet at home. I could buy data to go online, but I couldn’t download anything big.
I became a regular IRC (Internet Relay Chat) user and managed to find some friends on what use to be known as freenode. I would hang out at some channel with which I can recall one guy giving me a base64 encoded malicious command to run on my computer and I would see wonderful things.
Nothing wonderful came of it, it was a rm -rf / a very common prank usually played on newbies. This taught me the importance of not running commands you don’t understand. Thankfully, the backtrack OS I was on was a fresh install. Nothing important was lost.
I moved house again, but we were still in Brisbane. This time I was lucky to find that there was a Wi-Fi network nearby using WEP. First few months in that house I cracked it and could download massive files. This was the beginning now of the longest time I spent running linux, programming and hacking. It was around 2011, and I was probably in year 9. Around this time I tried Slackware, Ubuntu, and Debian. Although I used Debian and Slackware the most up until 2013-2014. Around 2014 I began using Gentoo as my friends from the IRC channels introduced me to it. Gentoo was a challenge, but I learned so much, such as how to partition drives, compile the kernel, and configure X11 and so much more. I also learned about chrooting into systems to fix them.
I would read other C programs and ended up writing C programs of my own. I wrote vidz and vocabnotify at this time. Which both used sqlite3 for data storage and taught me a lot about C and how open source C programs are organised. My friends would sometimes lean on my C skills to help them with hacking tools.
I did a few hacks on my school’s network dumping domain credentials with pwdump as I was able to get access to the teacher’s computer. My teachers knew I was good with computers so when something was broken they’d get me to fix it. This gave me the opportunity to dump the LM hashes. I later cracked those hashes with Ophcrack at the time. The credentials were to a mail server which I later used to bypass the school’s web filter so we can access the wide internet and watch YouTube via a Sock5 proxy. Other hacks I did were straight up vandalism such as sending domain messages to all users on the network. Figuring out how to play video games despite restrictions. This one was simply zipping the application folder. We would play halo, star wars battlefront, and other LAN games. I was somewhat notorious amongst the nerds.
The last hack I did which I don’t have time for, had me expelled from school.
Today (I use Mint by the way)
Well these days I no longer use Gentoo. In fact there’s a huge gap where I didn’t run Linux as a daily driver at all. Right around 2015 when I got my first job as a result of the hacking I did back in school. I was rocking Elementary OS dual booting with Windows on my desktop and Acer Crungbang or Mint on my laptop. I sometimes used the laptop for work as well. When I moved to a shared house I sold my dual booted desktop and my laptop died. I sold the desktop in 2018 as I didn’t want to be the culprit driving up the electricity bill. It was also because I wanted to not play video games as much so I can focus on learning programming. I purchased a Macbook Air 2015 and later purchased 2020 variant in 2020. I could still run all my favourite nix commands and still do my Uni assignments fine. Not that all this couldn’t be done on Linux, I just wanted a peace of mind. Gentoo traumatised me about days of fiddling with config files just to change something.
Linux is good, and it can teach you a lot if you have the time. But as I grew older pragmatism rather than fanaticism became more important. Now I’m one of those people that say right tool for the job. Today I dual boot Linux Mint and Windows 11. I use Windows 11 mostly to play video games, mostly old titles I didn’t get a chance to play and I use my Linux for programming. When time is limited you want things that just work. I have tried RPM based distros but Debian based distros stuck with me mostly due to familiarity.
So that’s my rather short history of how I got into Linux, programming and hacking. Again I do not condone unethical hacking. I do not encourage anyone to go ahead and hack into systems they don’t own. Rather this illustrates how necessity led me to do a few unethical things. I wouldn’t do these things today.