How did you get started?

[limdis]

So I've seen a lot of posts asking 'how hackers learn to hack' all over the forums and a few times when I visit IRC to watch apples owning someone. Well I had an idea the other day to start up a thread for everyone to post their little story on how it all got started. So I'll go first:

Back in high school I bought a game (BGII), and was unable to instal it. So I asked a friend of mine who I knew to be computer savvy to come over and figure out wtf I was doing wrong. After a couple min he laughs at me and said I did not have enough space on my hard drive. Confused I asked him to explain. He informed me that I only had a whopping 4gb hard drive and most of it was being used. Still confused I asked him to explain further, he tried but just had to show me. So he took my computer apart. First time I had ever seen inside a computer and let me tell you I was fascinated! For the next 2 weeks I was asking him nonstop questions so he finally introduced me to one of the tech admins for the high school. I learned about all kinds of things and how/why students lose their privileges on the school network, and hilarious stories about students attempting to hack the network. WTF was hacking? I went home and pulled up some google and bam, I found hackthissite.org. This was in Feb 2004 (ish) if I remember correctly. Just stunned at what I was seeing I stayed up way too late for a school night, and when I heard my Mom coming down the stairs I quickly turned the monitor off in a panic and jumped in the bed. Well Mom got on the computer and saw what I was looking at. She busted in my room and said, "Boy if you tap into that hackin' I swear I will not bail you out of jail! You are grounded!!" The next night sneaking out of bed a message appears on my screen informing me that due to parental controls I could not access the web and the current attempt and time will be saved in the logs. I froze. What to do... Mom had put a shortcut on the desktop that would take her to the router login. So I clicked on it and I found myself looking at a login screen with the username already filled in with her email address. So I thought for a min and tried several things for what I thought might be the password; her birthday, my birthday, password, admin, I tried no password, then I remembered she liked horses. "horses" was the password. I disabled the time lock, disabled the log feature, and after I got my fill of HTS I turned the time lock back on so she wouldn't notice. It was then, right then, I knew that anything was possible with a little patience and thinking outside the box. I was hooked...

[MrAim]

I learned what Google was.
I then learned what a torrent was.
Next, I found out about keygens.
Then learned the hard way that someone can remotely fuck your shit up if you're a damned moron and install something malicious.
Searched how to protect versus such a thing in the future and how to patch up the holes in my computer.
I figured the best way to learn to protect myself from a hacker, was to learn to hack.
Googling 'Learn to hack' brought up this site as #1 like 4 or 5 years ago.
Found out I was too fucking stupid back then to learn the shit, so studied more about computers and how they work.
Last month, I return, realizing I'm still a fucking idiot and cant even complete all the realistic missions without the forum stickys about them.
Soon, I'll be in college, learning the right way.

/coolstorybro

[edone automaton]

"Boy if you tap into that hackin' I swear I will not bail you out of jail! You are grounded!!"

Your mam FTW

erm, just sort of drifted into it really through making music on an old pc and constantly having to resolve issues, always pushed a little bit further by curiosity. Not that I would call myself a hacker....

[MNP_Hikaru]

Two years ago I started working at a grocery store and became friends with my co-worker. He in turn introduced me to three of his friends, and all four of these guys are majoring in CS, CIS, Programming, you name it. All of them have been on this site at one point or another (Actually, one of them had a teacher bring their whole class to HTS to use the missions as practice!), and they had me come here too. I started reading around and managed a couple of the first missions (Javascript seemed to be my forte'), but then realized I was looking up solutions more than I was looking up processes and how things worked, and realized I was being dumb. XD Since then I've been reading books here and there on computers (working on building my own right now), took a couple of programming classes, and solving the rest of the missions on my own, as well as reading around this forum for a year or so. I've still got a long way to go myself, but I definitely see it as worth it.

[tremor77]

I'm pretty sure this thread already exists... ... ... ... ... - my story is there.. now go look.

[Abstinence]

It was around 2000 I guess, I went to a technical school, where I learned about electronics and finished high school with an Electronics technician degree, at that time I was messing around with lots of "weird" stuff, from home made gunpowder, to home made tasers (big as a suitcase though), then I read about phreaking, which led me and a couple of friends to electronics hacking (nothing relevant). Somewhere around two or three years ago I applied for a job at a big IT company, and got a position at Logical Access (user IDs creation and management) on Unix/Linux platforms, since then I've been growing, next February I'll technically be a semi senior AIX SysAdmin, and in these past two years I read shitloads of everything, from port scanning, to SQL injections, not in detail though, but I'm on my way

[Drizna]

I remember when I was in Middle school, my dad tried to password his Windows 3.1 OS. The problem with this is Escape key let you in full control with no password. Through out my youth I knew how to program the t.v. with all channels that worked, program the v.c.r. with all channels, and correct time, was always doing something to my computer, just so that I could fix it. I never knew what I was doing was considered hacking (old time hacking, not today's defenition of the word.) So one day I watched the movie hackers, and decided to look up all the characters to see who was real. Almost all movies used a real character of some sort. Found an interview of Emanuel Goldstein, and was like "Holy crap he is real?" From him learned about this site. Had it in bookmarks for years, just never logged in, because I was raised to believe from my parents that I would never amount to anything, and that I was a screw up. And some of you know the story of why I came on here now. Been loving every minute on this forum/website.

[1njustice]

For me it was a little different. When I was younger I was big into the devil also known as runescape.. I know.. I know.. I met some people on there who taught me about keylogging, we set up a forum dedicated to runescape account give aways and account give aways etc.. I then got onto project neptune and started messing around there.. Using the common method of masking the keylogger behind a 'stat changer'.. I was hooked, unfortunately my internet was shut down due to the mother always complaining about kids arguing.. La de da.. So the obsession faded, recently it's sprung back to life and here I am today. Found this site, completed the basics with little problems and I'm loving it here.