About Me

Well... If you are here, you probably know who I am anyway, but here is a little of my very recent history that you may be wondering about. Don't expect to find anything juicy, ground-breaking or particularly interesting here because you won't.

I am not what many would call a spring chicken, which is obvious when you consider that I am the proud grandfather of five grandchildren, the youngest of which was born on the 13th November 2011. Anyway, that sort of thing is not really why you are here or why you are reading this, so onto the types of things you may actually like to know.

As you are reading this, I am sure you are aware that I am one of the core developers of BackTrack, widely considered to be the best security OS for security professionals. But I know some of you wonder, how did I become interested in BackTrack and how did I become one of the core developers?

Well, it's not very interesting as some of you already know, but here goes for those of you that don't.

A few years ago now, I used to be a volunteer at a special needs school, helping them out with their day to day IT needs. The technical support that this school needed was too expensive and too much of their budget was being swallowed up on mostly rather trivial technical problems. My other half who was at the time a governor at the school made me aware of this situation, so I decided to offer to help them out as and when they needed.
This arrangement worked out well for all of us, I got to do something I loved doing and the school was able to save a load of money and free up a teacher to do the kinds of things that a teacher should be doing. As time went on, the school grew rapidly thanks to a huge injection of government cash. The point came where they needed to have full time IT staff which at the time I was unable to commit so much time to, so it became time for us to part ways. I still kept in touch with the person who became the IT manager for quite some after leaving.
There came a day when I heard that he had just implemented Wi-Fi across the entire site. At that time I knew that WEP was broken and that WPA support was still quite rare in equipment. So I asked him if he knew that he was essentially presenting the entire network to anyone with a little knowledge. He knew nothing of the insecurities of WEP and invited me to show him how bad things were “if I could”. Not being one to turn down a challenge like that and wishing to ensure that the network and its data were kept safe, I accepted the challenge. So this brings me to the point where I first came into contact with BackTrack.
I knew that given the scope of this challenge and what I was and wasn’t allowed to do, I needed an all in one solution and preferably something live CD based.

Well, to cut what is quickly becoming a long story short, I tried many of the live security OSes out there but only one fitted my needs, felt comfortable and natural to use, and that was BackTrack v1. I spent the next week getting familiar with BackTrack, making sure all the hardware I intended to use worked as expected and perfecting techniques. We setup an afternoon for me to come into the school and show the IT manager just how bad things were. After about 20mins I had broken the encryption, was on the network and had obtained the head teachers username and password as well as the IT managers, the look on his face was priceless. Needless to say, it was a further year before Wi-Fi was enabled again on that network. Such was my first introduction to BackTrack and the awesome power contained within, I was hooked.
Soon after that I became a member of the forums which had been such a valuable resource of the information I needed during the initial few weeks of using BackTrack. Not long after BT2 came out, I finally felt comfortable enough to start offering what I had learnt as help towards other members of the forum by answering their questions and writing a few tutorials (Most of which do not exist anymore). Towards the end of BT2 and the start of BT3 I was asked if I would become a moderator of the forums which I was happy to accept. About the same time I was asked if some of those tutorials that I had written for the forums could be included in and upcoming book which turned out to be “The Pentester’s Open Source Toolkit Volume 2”, and if you happen to have or have read the book you will know that I said yes.
About the time of BT4 being planned I was asked if I would like to produce a “few packages” for the new BackTrack version that was just starting to be worked on. Little did I know exactly what a “few packages” actually meant. It was about the same time I was asked if I would take on the role as an admin for the forums too. So this now brings us up to date, I am still an admin on the forums, although a few time constraints have meant I cannot spend as much time as I would like on them as I would like to and am one of the core developers of BackTrack.

So there you go, that is a little of the recent history that outlines part of my involvement with BackTrack and backtrack-linux.org. There is a lot more to that, such as my involvement in the IRC channel and the podcasts I have been part of for social-engineer.org but I don’t want to bore you with all of that as well. I hope that this will have answered some of the questions on how I got involved with BT and that I have not bored you too much.
Something else that this page will show is as I have always said, I am no writer and have never professed to be one.