I don't know if this is the right place to put this...but I saw something the other day that kinda blew me away. You guys might appreciate this.
>Working as an intern in scary place
>get paired with dinosaur as my mentor
>oh boy
>old man is chill as fuck, place has 70%+ annual turnover, how is this guy here
>I know I'm hot shit and Ill have to grin and bear his aged grandstanding
>crisis happens and analysis's are shitting their collective pants
>dinosaur still doing isometrics in his cubical, telling me to join him
>already sick of his shit and ask him why he isn't doing anything as a senior operator
>he laughs, pulls out his personal laptop running gnome3 and proceeds to forcably push a backup through to the compromised backup servers and then to rest of network
>grill him about dangers of having his own computer exploited "you can't keep them all out," etc etc.
>points out that his computer has a falsified tcp/ip stack, glorious firewall, grsecurity, PAX, Selinux configured in a MLS MAC & RBAC with spotless supplemental kernel mods stopping brute force exploitation and both stack and heap page protections.
>I look at dinosaur in awe
tldr: don't always judge someone by their age in the IT sector, you might learn something from them.
Anybody with similar stories of wizard greatness?
Kinda looked like this, but with shorter hair.
Also, any other security minded folks here?
Or is this just a meeting place for plebs who like to pretend that they actually understand computers?
>senior year college
>new transfer into program
>literal neckbeard with rubberbanded beard, ponytail, and everything
>is this nigga serious
>he's a legit loonix admin and is in the program just to get a degree so he can get higher pay
Guess when you work from home and remote into work from your basement into another state you don't have to worry in the slightest about your appearances.
he sounds like a dipshit desu.
>Or is this just a meeting place for plebs who like to pretend that they actually understand computers?
Probably this
>>55278440
Sounds like he staged the crisis if he's that good and couldn't prevent it.
>>55278526
But did he have truly god-like powers?
One can wear a Hawaiian shirt and be carrying Cheeto dust yet still remain a pleb..
>>55278583
He left the supervision of those servers to a pair of underlings. I think he was trying to get them to spread their wings. I honestly think he's to good for that shit. Bastard managed to corrupt me into being a part-time whitehat developer in my free time.
>>55278569
Know of any specific places of enrichment?
>>55278440
>push a backup through to the compromised backup servers and then to rest of network
This is so forensically unsound that I don't want to go into details.
>falsified tcp/ip stack
Really? I'm sure it's bug free and his kernel hooks are bullet-proof.
>glorious firewall
netfilter is buggy as hell and this sounds like bullshit.
>grsec, PaX, SELinux
Stepping on each others' toes and still bypassable.
>spotless supplemental kernel mods stopping brute force and both stack and heap page protections
WTF is this? Sounds like garbage tier security marketing hype. PaX has stack and heap protections and even some NULL ptr deref protection. SELinux has system call hooks that filter parameters to look for obvious signs of exploitation.
What advantages does his system have over a laptop with a virtual machine running a known good snapshot of an OS install which only exists to push backups over the network using a dedicated management LAN? Why would he get in the way of incident response? I guess getting the systems back to normal ASAP is good, but I doubt the methods.
>>55278643
Reddit and IRC plus a few mailing lists.
>>55278440
> network was compromised
the game is already over
>>55278440
>buzzword diarrhea
Lol either you're full of shit, or the guy was.
