Before the OSCP

Today I have registered for the  OSCP, first of all I do not have much experience in IT. I don't have a long history with technology like so many people in the industry seem to have. My family always had a computer, I just never really was able to use it. It sat in our living room, I had a youtube account and a myspace, I was not proficient at all with technology like some wizards in the field. When I was 15 my parents finally divorced, my birthday came up and I received around 600$ by asking my family members for only cash, flooding in India destroy much of the nations inventory at the time so purchasing the parts in store was expensive. Luckily I had  friends helping me before PC partpicker, we did a little bit of research in order to figure out whether the hardware would be under powered or not. Went out and purchased them, at the time relatively high end without a GPU. The latest and greatest AMD processor had 8 cores which they wanted to (and ended up) overclocking, 16Gb of RAM, a 650 watt power supply, 1Tb hardrive, and some ATX Motherboard that had the same blue color as the RAM, so internally it was pretty sexy looking. It just didn't have a graphics card so everything ran off the one built into the processor. My parents being separated I lived with my mother most of the time, she didn't have internet. The new place she moved into didn't have much, it had my new desktop with a monitor and cables I saved from being thrown by someone else, an xbox 360 that was over used connected to a television, and we didn't have service. I couldn't help and  couldn't get a job my entire highschool life because when it came to transportation my options were to walk 2 hours, ride the bus, or ask for a ride to work. I never had reliable transportation to anywhere so I was honest and was turned down by every single fast food place. I didn't have a way to help but I didn't have to work at that point in my life.

 My friends got me a few things over the next month so I had something to do since  I didn't have internet, a couple torrented games, a USB with tails because 4chan had this thing for the dark web, visual studio 2007 and another IDE called blood plus I believe. I had some audio software for making music and like GIMP as well. I purchased a book called "C++ for Dummies" and was so bored out of my mind I learned to code. It wasn't hard, but I had a lot of free time. My home life was never good, and my grades suffered. I played video games, I read to escape, and had a thing for math, physics and NLP. I read Hawking, Penrose, Kaku, Vygotsky, Freud, Greene, Saussere, Cialdini, looking over my bookshelf it was pretty diverse. There was even a period in which I was looking at building a drop tube particle accelerator after reading one of Michio Kaku's books and learned how to and came close to making this.

We got our hands on all sorts of things, the Tesla deathray specs, FBI files on the guy who invented scientology, weapon making anarchist cookbook like stuff, just all sorts of weird things from an onion site just called "the TOR library" which had been making it's rounds on 4chan back then. Living with my mother was the only way I could play video games in highschool, but that gets boring alone. She would go to the library, rent movies and I would watch anything with this little "C" which meant it was published by criterion. Those films really made me think and I always felt like I had become more or experienced something significant after watching them. I'm telling you all this to make it clear, I was a very bored, very curious, high schooler with nothing to do and came from a home where every other hobby was taken away from me by my father except academic materials due to my failing grades. I had a massive excess of free time and loneliness that no one should experience. Without internet or anything  to do I had a computer with tools and  a  book on coding, so I learned, got bored, copy and pasted code I wrote, then read more and found out I didn't need to do things like that, I'd watch a movie, play a game, and come back to it.

I hated programming. I would get frustrated when things didn't work, go do something else and come back to it since I was bored. I learned C++ over 2 weeks, then I learned C, I was creating programs that were useless, making text adventures (which suck when you know how they end), doing programming challenges, I didn't have internet but I had two giant reference books for both C and C+ to flip through. I had to figure things out on my own. I would go to my fathers house with my PC, browse the internet, torrent anything and everything I wanted, then go home. My life was like that for 2 year until my mother finally got an internet connection. I was done with programming, I tried to work with C+ and make games for a while but it didn't happen because I had so much time being frustrated with it. I kept browsing 4 chan, the dark web, did some web application stuff on those hack and learn sites, until I saw a guy hop out of an unmarked white van, which drove off, and watched him walk up to my door. I was the only one home so I answered,  he handed me a card for an organization called the "north american arbor association" or something, which when googled didn't exist. I panicked and quit. I was geo hot, no more TOR, no more trading coding for bitcoin, I panicked and destroyed everything which I kind of regret now. I became as normal as possible, finished highschool and went to college,dropped out and so on.

I'm not going to bore you with details anymore. After dropping out of college I went to california, worked with property investments and I started getting curious again, I learned python and C#, started to learn about hacking again. Then ended up homeless, I bought a laptop on a credit card, and needless to say, started doing whatever I could to make money, and did what I had to so I could get by. I was not that great technically and still am not, I realized most low level hackers and scam artist rely on social engineering and was no exception to that group. I went home, I failed and gained a lot of financial skills and a new attitude.

I'm better now, maybe, I'm still struggling to get by, but I stay legitimate and I'm lucky I didn't end up in jail. Earning this cert is a gateway to a better job and financial security. Being homeless really changed my attitude and put me into a mindset of anything it takes to get by. It's not just enough to be smart or to just do things. I have to try harder, I have too work hard a well as plan and think. I want safety and peace of mind in my life and earning the OSCP, getting a job as a pentester and having that much money allows me the financial security I have never had, allows me to start on a path to creating my own business and the salary and larger amount of money earned gives me a baseline for such a thing. I'm opening this blog to document my experience with technology, I don't want to allude that this is all I do because I do have a personal life and other interests, but it's a constant in my life and that's important.