What is the hacker community?

all right thanks a lot Nathan let's give these guys a round of applause they've done a great job setting us up okay so first of all I'm thrilled to be here with you guys get everybody in the back here me anyway about me good ok this mics gonna start drifting this way so when you can't hear me wave your hand that's good guys good all right so thanks again for having me I'm really thrilled to be here so what I want to do is just take some time today and sort of share a bit of my adventures around the world what we've been up to through hackers for charity and just sort of give you a sense of what I've

discovered and specifically what I've learned about hackers and what I've learned about this community so first of all for those of you that don't know me let me give you just a little bit of background I've been involved in technology since I was about seven years old my dad brought home you know computer from work and I proceeded to take it apart you know like right away and just fell in love with technology and I was an only child and didn't have a whole lot of friends so I was your typical you know computer nerd from an early age you know just found this connection with technology and one of the things that I was really drawn to

was this idea of figuring out puzzles you know that to me that's what technology was it was it was just something incredibly complex that not many people knew a whole lot about you know and again this is this is the 70s and 80s we're talking about so it was sort of different than today where everybody's got a device in their pocket and that kind of thing but I was drawn to this idea of just figuring out very complex puzzles and that's what drew me into security and specifically into hacking and I saw that as you know the hardest thing that you could do with technology really was for me it was breaking security I didn't give too much

thought to how to secure things and admittedly to this day I I still don't sorry for those of you that are on defense but you know that's a harder job I do the easier stuff and just you know break security systems but around the year 2000 I was working for a big company I was working for Computer Sciences Corporation and I started a pen testing team that's still running today called strike force and this was one of the first teams that was out there corporate teams that was out there doing professional hacking so we would you know not only break into networks doing remotes we would do you know internal assessments we would do physical

assessments breaking into building social engineering lock picking all that stuff and this was around the year 2000 so 17 years ago and around that time I started this you know figuring out a bit of a methodology that we'd go through with every client and one of the first things that we do with any client when we're doing a remote was we'd start doing Google searches to find out about their internet presence and around then I sort of figured out that you could get an awful lot from Google and so I started this thing called the Google hacking database how many of you have heard of this thing and and started this idea of Google hacking which was this

silly concept that you could break pretty much break into sites get sensitive information from a site without doing anything except Google searching you know we'd go through all this effort to break through firewalls and do remote exploits and all that stuff to get say access to a database well with a Google search I found that we could do similar stuff and for whatever reason maybe it was the timing of this but this Google hacking thing really blew up and got a lot of attention got a lot of publicity and by 2004 I had pretty much reached the pinnacle of my career I had some notoriety and I was speaking at Def Con which to me was sort of the top of the

hill once you spoke at Def Con that that meant you were a real hacker I guess you know you were justified and so I thought a lot about that as being very important to me you know and was excited about that about that possibility for all the wrong reasons you know I thought it would it would make me happy I thought it would it would justify all the effort that I put in and all the time that I spent alone in my room you know without friends and you know and I gave a talk about Google hacking and frankly it was it was awful I ran into a guy this morning that said he saw

that talk and and I apologized to you because it was it was an awful talk and and frankly it was all about me and and becoming you know something bigger and I guess but an interesting thing happened that year because of that talk where I was sort of at the top of what I thought was the mountain you know I had I had a great job I had a you know a great family I had you know a great salary I could buy just about whatever I wanted I spoke at Def Con but I was kind of miserable and sort of had this like emptiness inside and the way it manifested itself in my life was I sort

of fell back on my upbringing which was my Christian roots and I decided I was gonna commit suicide in the industry and post on my website that I was a Christian I was like you know that seems pretty suicidal but it was genuine on my part because I felt this emptiness and I was searching for something bigger than myself and literally posted that on my website and said this little prayer like okay God if you want to do something with my life do it because this sucks and you could argue this point indefinitely about what happened next or why but the fact was that stepping away from myself that process of backing off for myself sort of blew up and a

publisher approached me and said would you would you like to write a book on this Google hacking thing and that was interesting to me because I thought you wrote a book and then you went to get a publisher but for me it was the other way around and so what happened was Google hacking for penetration testers was released it became this huge seller the Google hacking thing blew up I got I worked on a dozen more book projects my career exploded for the next three years and I found another mountaintop and I got to another mountaintop where I went man my career is even better than before and I've accomplished so much and right around that time my wife went on a

missions trip to Uganda and now this was in 2006 and I remember this because I was in Caesars Palace in a suite because I was a speaker you know I had a marble bathroom with like three showerheads and two LED screens in this really nice room and my wife texts me from Uganda and she says we have power back now we have water - I'm really happy walked to work with chickens and goats and I was just struck by how we were on completely different planets at that moment and something struck me when she returned and she showed me videos and pictures of what she saw over there you know I saw the face of poverty I saw what it looked

like I also saw joy in her which I hadn't seen before which I didn't have I saw joy and those kids who didn't have anything that I didn't have and it just grabbed me there was sadness obviously she was sad about what she saw and obliterated by it but she was also happy so in 2007 I decided we were gonna I was gonna go to Uganda and figure out what she saw there I needed to know what what she had gotten in Uganda and so in the the bottom right there you can see the picture of one of our first trips to Uganda my wife and I went and I spent some time surprisingly enough doing

computer work for a non-profit over there because they didn't have anyone to help them with their donated computers that were keeping track of kids medical donations and school donations that people would pay for and I spent two weeks doing computer work in Uganda East Africa which is certainly not what I expected to be doing over there but it connected me with something where my skills were making a difference literally saving people's lives and I didn't I didn't see that coming so in 2008 we decided hey let's take our kids on a trip I think it's important that our kids see what Uganda's like and see the pictures there in 2008 we took our kids to Uganda and I saw a change in

them you know they they opened up they they didn't play video games for two weeks which was which was stunning you know they played it with sticks and rocks and chickens and stuff and and although it was hard it's a it's a developing country my kids just loved it and by 2009 we decided as a family to move to Uganda full-time and basically that was the end of my career if you will that was when I got out of InfoSec basically I walked away from my job we didn't have much income to speak of but an interesting thing happened because the hacker community surrounded us during that time and was funding these trips that we were taking to Uganda even

though you know they knew the first trip was a missions trip with a church when I went with my wife because we were going with with you know our church but that didn't seem to matter to this community in fact our first trip was primarily funded by an atheist and agnostic a Wiccan and a Jew you know and fur for a white bread Christian boy that was you know a little bit surprising but it shouldn't have been surprising because as I would find out this was what the hacker community was really all about so when I got back from Uganda that first time and I felt that joy of helping people I founded an organization called

hackers for charity and the idea was simple the idea was let's take the technology ability that's in the hacker community and try to use it to help people you know let's find ways that we can help charities or help people in need with the skills that we have and so this is sort of a whirlwind of what happened since 2009 now being a technology guy one of the first things I wanted to do when I got on the ground is I was like we need to put computers in schools because they just weren't there and so the hacker community got together and donated equipment we lugged it over to Uganda which was really difficult it's as you can imagine it's we're

talking suitcases on an airplane to bring computer equipment over it's 30 it's about 36 hours door-to-door to get the equipment from here to there and it's tough but we we took computers over and the the response with these kids was just stunning I mean you can see the way that they're standing up on chairs to get a look at a computer and that just that kind of thing just doesn't happen here and I was shocked by that the fact is none of the kids in this room had ever touched a computer and so this was a big deal to them so we started looking around for other places to put computer labs this is this is a note to you it

probably looks like a shed or maybe maybe an outhouse or something like that that is not an outhouse this is an outhouse and Uganda and that is scary I can tell you firsthand this is not a place you want to be this is like something out of a zombie movie or something inside there it is it's bad but anyway that this is not a shed this is an extra building at a school in Uganda and we basically turned this this building about the size of a decent bathroom into a computer lab again using donated equipment from the hacker community now I wish I could tell you that this this had a happy ending but it

didn't it turns out that because of the technology gap the teachers and the administrators and even the students didn't have the faintest idea how to care for this equipment most of them had never touched a computer the teachers had zero experience using a computer so they weren't qualified to teach them half of the people that touch the mouse grabbed it with the opposite hand so if the mouse is on the right side they're grabbing it with the left hand I mean little things like that made me realize wait they weren't ready for this hey this great idea that I had of putting computers into schools was not a great idea and I needed to take some time to

listen to what the needs were and unfortunately this was a bit heartbreaking because the computers were degrading and they weren't serving their purpose so we had to pull them out of some of these classrooms and what we did is we started a training center and this is a picture of the outside of our training center this this kid randomly walked by with a hacker shirt on which I thought was hilarious thought that was great but basically we consolidated the equipment into a training center and the idea here was let's use this equipment but let's watch over it ourselves and let's bring people into the center and give them the basic skills that they need starting with

teachers so the teachers can go out and teach the kids and this was this was absolutely a success in fact this year alone we have 200 of our students have landed jobs and we trained over 1,600 students this smaller statistic of people getting jobs was unexpected my goal was just to provide education but what a lot of our students that came into our center that took classes for free did is they took those skills to get jobs and in true African fashion one person getting a job helps a dozen people in an extended family so this was this was a significant number for us but besides our students we created impactful careers for our staff as well

this is Josh kirinda he's one of our leading instructors and one of his goals with the training center was to get out of the training center he realized that not everybody could get into the center so what he wanted to do is he wanted to get people that were out in the villages that were outside the towns and bring the training to them to try to help them and that really inspired me so I started looking for ways that we could expand out and reach people that couldn't get into the town and I'm gonna show you a video this is this is a video that I found when I was sort of doing some research when I was in Uganda let's see

if I can get the audio to work

please all that long ago I planted a crop of potatoes they started dying one of the real check out the books and they did tell me much so I did a I did the such [Music] but that diseases one of the websites told me that ants could be the problem it said sprinkle wood ash over the plants then after few days the ants disappeared I got excited about the Internet this friend really would like to expand his business so when T named the cyber cafe and we checked out several sites when I met him next he was going to put a windmill at a local school I felt proud because something that wasn't there before go suddenly there I

realized that's not everybody can be able to access what I was able to access I thought that I need to have an internet that my grandmother can use and so I talked about a notice board a simple wooden notice but when I get information on the phone I'm able to post the information on the notice board so it's basically like a computer

[Music] my name is so many people have accessed information but is they'll follow up to that I think a follow up to that is our knowledge when people have to build it they can't find solutions without having to be helped information is powerful but is how we use it the 25 s like to thank our sponsor Google for that one thing they didn't sponsor this year today we have to reach out to them maybe that quote really grabbed me information is powerful but it's how we use it that will define us and when I saw this video I caught that Google went out and filmed this thing they went with a massive film crew to a place called SOI Kenya and

filmed this thing and I found this video three years after Google filmed it and I started doing some research and I thought man this guy must be huge by now he had Google behind them he had this great idea it was very inspirational using computers and the Internet to help people you know farmers and you know rural people like that and what I found out was that sadly he hadn't done much of anything you know the the goop the the video sort of went viral and Google promoted it but really nothing had happened with it so I sort of thought well what sort of technology can we put together that will bring resources to areas that don't have internet since

this stuff is so powerful so we worked with a group called world possible and we we teamed up with them and they had offline content Wikipedia Khan Academy Project Gutenberg and they were taking all these internet resources and making them available offline and so we came up with a bunch of devices that would take this repository and get it out there so for example um you see the Chromebook there this is a Chromebook that works offline with an SD card that has all that information on it on the little white device there is basically a device from Intel that we work to produce that takes content up to a terabyte of content and makes it wirelessly

available so it's a Wi-Fi device that's ruggedized and so people on their on their phones can actually get to the content and so I I said I'm gonna take all this stuff and I'm gonna travel to SOI Kenya to find Zach and I'm gonna give him all of this stuff and you can see I mean it was it was a real eyesore this place is a terrible place you don't wanna go there it's it's awful I know right it's some of the most beautiful country I've ever seen I get there and I'm all excited to give this this equipment to Zack it's been donated by the community we put all this effort into it and so I

dumped all this stuff on him you know I'm super excited I got my I hacked charity shirt on and everything in a Superman style I'm here to save you Zack and I give him the equipment and this is kind of the look that I get from him is he's just overwhelmed he's like oh well what is all this I'm a farmer and I realized that I had done it again you know I hadn't listened necessarily to his needs I just sort of jumped into a technology project and so I sort of had to reboot and get back to Zacks level and think okay well what can we do to help Zack and so he started training him

we gave him some pared down equipment we just focused on the Chromebook and he just ran with this thing he just started going all over Kenya sharing his knowledge with people and showing them how they can get the same information by leaving these little Rachel devices all over and showing them how to use it just put this all over Kenya and it was typical for Zack to be in the middle of in this case a maze field just showing farmers information about how to grow their crops better using a Chromebook in the middle of nowhere without internet and so this idea of extending technology to get it to more people sort of we sort of ran with this the next thing we did

is started working with satellite technology this was a project called Outernet which used repurposed satellite dishes you know TV satellite dishes to receive broadcasts that would be the same content that we had on there Rachel boxes and more it just quickly became obvious to us I guess that really there was a need for more technology for more advanced technology the more that we started doing this and so our students in the training center who were learning Word and Excel and all this stuff started coming to us and asking us questions like you know I want to learn Python I'm like Python what do you want to do with Python no I just want to learn Python okay so

we put together a Python course and somebody would come and say I want to learn about electronics and we we started seeing this curiosity build to the point where we had a subset of people who were very interested in advanced technology okay and so I thought well let me put it out to the hacker community and see what people think and soon enough we started getting responses one person in the community donated a 3d printer here's the here's a demonstration of the 3d printer in Uganda

[Music] and again you can just I mean it's a different level of excitement over there because this is like alien technology I mean here you can basically walk into any big-box store and see a 3d printer but over there was just something that was completely foreign so we saw that kids would get excited about advanced technology now I you could definitely argue well this doesn't make much sense in a place like Uganda where you know people are growing hungry you know it's not sustainable solution and you know and all this stuff but it's it was the excitement that the kids sort of picked up that kept us going you know this idea that they were seeing something that

they had never seen before and getting excited about it the next step was the kids when we started teaching them about these technologies was getting interested in robotics here's the the kids put together this is a Mindstorms robot that they put together and again you can see the excitement of this is a group of former street girls when they built their first robot and set it loose [Music]

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] and so again this was not necessarily the most practical skill to take to Uganda you think you know robotics and and all that stuff but again that excitement made a huge difference suddenly kids are asking you know about complex subjects science and technology and math and programming and they want to learn it because they want to understand the inner workings of how this thing works and to me that resonated with basically the hacker spirit you know the hacker mentality of wanting to get deeper into technology and regardless of the fact that you know all the nonprofit groups are going well you should be doing mosquito nets instead I really felt like we should

stay true to our roots and just sort of keep that that thirst for knowledge going this is our first robotics team this is a team called J robotics and they've graduated on to using vex which is you know the higher standard for robotics training in schools even up to the college level this team is headed to the vex robotics world championship they're going to be the first team that from Uganda and this has all come out of developing a space in Uganda hacker space where we could have these advanced technologies available so that's sort of what we've we did since 2009 when we moved to Uganda now it was a it was a great time that we had in Uganda but it

got to the point for our kids where it was time for them to go to college and it was time for our oldest ones to get into high school and quite frankly it was very difficult living in Uganda we were under constant threat of theft primarily tropical diseases you know there the infrastructure there is terrible you don't have access to good hospitals it was it was a heart it was a hard life for our family it was filled with a lot of joy but it was also very difficult and we started to get to the point where we were burned out because frankly all this work was happening through us because not a lot of people wanted to come to

Uganda no surprise there but we decided it was time to come back and so when I started thinking about you know what is it gonna be like leaving all of this work I started realizing that there's a lot of opportunity here in the US as well you don't have to go to Uganda to find poverty you don't have to find you don't have to go to Uganda to find kids that are excited about technology but don't have a way to learn about it and so what I wanted to do is I really wanted to focus my efforts on our local communities I wanted to find ways that that hackers could help not just in Uganda by supporting the work that we're

doing there but right here and earn in our own communities and of course I needed to find a job as well and that was gonna be pretty difficult after seven years out of the industry but things lined up perfectly right now I'm working for offensive security they've been friends of ours for a long time big supporters of HFC and what I'm doing specifically is I'm working on building the callee community my job full-time has become learning about communities learning about the hacker community figuring out what they're interested in what drives them what makes them tick so in a sense my job at offensive security and my job at HFC have come together sort of into one idea and it's this idea

of working with the community working with the hacker community we're working with the Northwest Arkansas Fab Lab is a start-up just got online they don't have a lot of equipment so we took our 3d printer and our CNC machine and robots and stuff that were donated by the community and we're kick-starting the Fab Lab over in Northwest Arkansas we've gotten groups of hackers together by request and gone to women's shelters to talk about privacy issues you know what is it how can we keep our data safe how can we be anonymous if we need to use social media you know in women's shelters a lot of times they need anonymity you know to you because they

have people that it might be looking to do them harm that kinds of things so imagine a bunch of hackers going into you know a women's shelter and giving a talk you know about protecting your privacy and all that so we've done we've done several things like that they sort of came out of the community but there's also been a lot of ways that doing things don't it doesn't involve technology for example there was a fire that was basically in our backyard when we were in Uganda that burnt down a village 220 people were basically homeless and I posted a video of the fire on Facebook and the hacker community responded and started sending money and so we set up shelters for them

we started feeding them and the money kept coming in and we had enough money to rebuild that village and then the money kept coming in and I realized that we've rebuilt the village gave these people their homes back but a lot of them didn't have job skills and a lot of them you know didn't have the interest to get into technology so I did some Google searches and found out about leatherworking you know because there was a leather tannery that was near this village and so we got on I got on Google and looked up how do you do leather work and we used the leftover money to buy and leatherworking tools so this is a

little training that we did providing leather working training in Uganda and one of the guys this is Johnson just became a master leather craftsman through this training you can see he's wearing a b-sides shirt there he's representing which is very cool but again this had nothing to do with modern technology it was just a need you know we saw a need in some people and as a community got together to help them and you know now we have an Etsy shop where we're selling leather stuff so all of this sort of comes together and the question that I'm often asked is what's next now that you're back in the US well one of the things that I'd like to do is

I would like to see the the training center still run I'd like to see our training center hackerspace run it cost about twelve thousand dollars a year to run that but so far we've been able to do it for the past seven years I'd also like to get you engaged in the community I'd like to hear your ideas that's my primary goal of moving back to the US really with HFC is to figure out ways that you might be interested in getting involved in the community some some final thoughts as this of all comes together I'm gonna do the cardinal sin here and read the slides no offense I know you guys can read but

first of all continue to work on solving impossible problems I mean really that's what we do best even outside of our industry I think one of our strengths is that we work together in uncommon ways I would love to see us leverage that reach for your dreams but don't forget those that can't you know there's nothing wrong with getting ahead in life just don't lose sight of the fact that there are people around you that are struggling you attended this conference you're out you're meeting people but for every one of you there's at least a thousand that haven't come to a conference that sort of like me we're sitting in you know our rooms trying to

do you know this stuff and trying to learn about it with potential I am a product of the hacker community the Google hacking database was was stuff that was submitted by the hacker community that turned into the Google hacking phenomenon that turned into the books that gave me my career everything I learned came from this community whether it was asking people on bulletin boards back in the days or getting on forums everybody in this community contributed to what I was able to do and that's basically true of everyone but not everyone is getting out to these things to be met you know in person rise above the trolls and the criminals defy expectations and shatter stereotypes

hacker the word hacker has gotten a negative image because of the media 99.9% of us in the community have jobs you know and families and careers we're not out there breaking the law you know where we're breaking into systems or defending systems for our clients but there aren't a lot of stories out there about hackers doing good I'd like to change that and I think I think small environment communities like this is a great place to start you know to really make a difference and change the face of our community and last but not least find outlets to keep this amazing job a fun hobby not just drudgery I've fallen victim to that where I got to a point where I lost my

hobby which was being involved in technology and it became a job and it started to become drudgery I'd encourage you not to let that happen find outlets and fun things to do with tech that are aside from your job that will keep it fun that'll keep it interesting because obviously it's it's a dream to love your work just share I'd encourage you to share it with others so to wrap it up whether you donate or get out and do something or simply help others inside or outside the hacker community you're a part of it so welcome to b-sides and welcome to the hacker community glad you guys are here thank you

all right this is our website and some other places that you can find out about the work that we're doing my email addresses there as well if you guys have any questions we have some time so if you guys would like to ask some questions I'll take questions if not I'll be around the conference all day but anybody have any questions comments heckling it's all welcome all right yes one there yeah so the question is is English the primary language and it is and that's one of the reasons that we went to Uganda's because the there wasn't much of a language barrier and there was comparably a lot of infrastructure considering I did have internet access although it was slow we

did have power you know most of the time we did have water that we didn't drink out of the tap you know but that's that's a lot more infrastructure then you find in some places but yeah English was definitely the first language yes what's that so the question is has this experience changed what our kids are doing and sort of what their what their path is the experience has definitely changed them for the better in a lot of ways I mean what they had exposure to is something that kids see for soundbites on TV it's not something that most kids in the u.s. experience on a daily basis even the level of poverty here in the US is very

different than what you see in Uganda but at the same time they saw incredible things they did incredible things you know seeing you know elephants and giraffes and zebra and you know going taking kayaking trips as part of you know a school curriculum you know all this all this stuff that you know kids generally don't have access to they did and it really opened their eyes interestingly most of my kids aren't crazy about technology like I am they don't look at it and go I want to learn absolutely everything there is to my kids technology is a tool you know and it will become a part of their careers for sure but I don't foresee that any of

them will be like me in the sense that they have to rip apart everything and figure out how it works and I think part of that is simply because of the generation you know having access to technology everywhere gives you the ability to use it as a tool and use it in creative and interesting ways it's not technology for technology's sake but yeah it was it was a great experience for them but at the same time we're all very glad to be back it was seven seven years was a long time and frankly to be perfectly honest you know we all came back in shock you know definite PTSD type stuff because we were constantly

living in an environment that was difficult in a harsh environment and that became normal and that's not normal here and so we're still trying to figure it all out but it's it's great to be back thank has a good question yes yeah the question is do we plan on doing anything in other countries so here's here's what I see 4-h FC is I don't I don't want to be the person that stands up here and says this is our big project that we're gonna do I want you guys to help me with it or give me money or whatever what what my vision is for HFC is to have the community come up with interesting ideas and then we sort of

help you along in the path so whether it's you know you want to set up a non-profit or you're like well I think I'd like to help it you know a local school with some young kids but I don't know the first thing about teaching or what to teach them and we say well from our experience here's the three things that work the best if you're in first grade it's this robotics kid if you're in third grade it's this kit we give you you know access to the kits and the curriculum so that you don't have to do the effort to figure out what to do we help you in that you know or you know we use our platform our

Twitter feed or a Facebook page to promote what you're doing or to draw attention to the work that you're doing I don't want HFC to be driving the projects I want HFC to be assisting you in doing something that you are excited about or interested in so whether that's here in the US or it's in any other country I think it's just wide open that's a good question anyone else okay great well thank you guys so much I really appreciate your time I look forward to hanging out with you guys and definitely enjoy the conference and drop me a line if you have any more questions thanks so much [Applause]