First of all, welcome to my infosec blog! If you don’t already know, my name is Abdullah Ansari and I’m currently a freshman in college attending a public university in Houston. Some of my interests (other than infosec) are playing open-world games, real estate investing, learning languages, and hanging out with family and friends. You can say I’m pretty much your average college kid.
Ever since high school, I’ve been fascinated by the world of “hacking” which advertises itself as an adrenaline-filled life of breaking into systems, networks, and buildings you aren’t supposed to be in. I didn’t hack my school and change everyone’s grades or anything spectacular (& stupid) like that, but I’ve allegedly done my fair share of script kiddie stuff on my PRIVATE labs of course.
My real hook into this field though was a youtube video by Insider which showed an actual red team in action. Basically, a cameraman followed the team around as they stealthily infiltrated and compromised several critical power stations and control centers in the local power grid. Seeing the tools they used and the absolute blast they were having while picking locks, flying drones, and fooling sensors really made this a serious deal for me.
I felt like it clicked and figured that a career like this would be a dream. Ever since then, I’ve been having tons of fun playing around with GitHub scripts, Metasploit, Kali boxes, and lock picks while dipping my toes into some theory and basic IT fundamentals.
Now, at some point after high school, I began to think about what I wanted to do with my life career-wise. Since I chose to be an MIS major (which is under business), I had several options. I could choose from management consulting, IT consulting, project management, data analysis, software engineering, business analysis, etc..etc… Unfortunately, with all due respect, all of these seemed extremely tedious and boring to be completely frank. I hated coding with a passion (thanks to AP CompSci 1&2) and organizational management talk put me to sleep real quick.
After taking my first semester, I finally realized that I could do what I love and enjoy doing and have someone pay me a ton of money and give me a job with great benefits, high flexibility (partly thanks to covid), and job security which seems like a SWEET deal if you ask me. So now, I have decided to pursue this path with the dedication and tenacity of someone who REALLY wants to be successful in this field. If I’m able to pull this off, I can sincerely and honestly say, that I will absolutely not be from among the 85% of Americans who hate their job.
Onto the good stuff. After hanging around and interacting with the security community on forums, Linkedin, and other blogs, I’ve learned that this group places an enormous value on giving back and helping out whoever you can with whatever you have expertise in. This is actually one of the things that drew me further into this field.
For example, I’m currently studying for the CompTIA Security + exam and I can’t even count how many “my experience” or “my journey” posts I have read over the internet. Needless to say, they have all been incredibly helpful with links to materials, proven strategies, and tips/tricks that only come by actually doing things.
All of this free information and selfless passing down of knowledge has inspired me to create a blog myself to hopefully give back a fraction of what I have taken from the InfoSec community. Even helping a single person would be enough to satisfy me, but my aim is to reach as many people and provide as much value as possible.
For the duration of this blog, I will closely monitor and journal every major step in my journey to turn my passion into a full-time career. I will talk about everything from college to certifications to interviews and everything in between, so stay tuned if you’re interested.
Now, as of this moment, I have no shame in saying that my hacking skills are just a bit above the script kiddie level. However, I realize that I’ve got a long way to go and that actually makes me really excited. My uncle once told me to just enjoy the journey and stop worrying about the destination, it will come by itself, and I plan on taking his advice (you should too).
A general roadmap for me right now, based on everything I’ve read and researched looks pretty straightforward.
So that’s the plan ladies and gentlemen. That being said, things are quite shaky in the world right now what with covid and all, so things might shift here and there, but I’m set on getting through this and making something out of myself. Plus, I’ll get to share my experiences, learn from the community, and also give back what little I can, so I see it as a win-win-win. Anyways, this is probably the longest post I’ll ever write, but now that formalities are out of the way, I’ll embark on this path with the next post which will document my Security + journey so be on the lookout for that. See ya’ll on the next one!