How Hackers Saved My Life

hello everybody um i uh i don't see i don't see i wonder can i see the attendees yes okay i see the attendees well welcome uh everybody my name is tyrone gaiden and i have the pleasure of uh introducing our speaker el marquez and of course you're in the breakout session called how hacker saved my life hopefully you read the uh the introduction um i was chatting up with elle a little bit so you know very interesting background and you know and and i'm just uh looking forward to the conversation so i'm going to uh stop talking and and let her have the rest of it and elle it is all yours how hacker saved my life

thank you so much and thanks everyone for joining i'm going to do a just a few bits of housekeeping if you all don't mind first of all a deep apology for uh maybe the sound quality the video quality da ha dha dallas hackers association decided that they were gonna have their first in person meet up i threw everything i could remember in a suitcase and four and a half hours was here can't give that up so uh some things got left behind but whatever more hackers will figure this out and the second thing that i wanted to say is though this talk is about my story if you have questions you listen to part of it you're like well that's

interesting i wonder how i can please feel free to ask career questions mentoring questions anything that kind of relates like i am here to help you that it just for this so with that being said thank you so much for joining me today in how hackers saved my life i know a lot of people look at this title and they think that it's very grandiose right it's this big title that i just chose in order to have you come to this talk to garner attention i'm hoping go through and you listen to all this that you'll realize it's but i mean hackers did save my life in the very truest form but before i start telling you my

story maybe i should introduce myself my name is el marquez and i am the biggest goofball you will ever meet i am the linux and security advocate at insert i'm also an advocate for operation safe escape right here from the second slide i am going to tell you how you as part of the hacker community life if you haven't heard about it operations safe escape is enough dedicated to helping victims of domestic violence that are being targeted by their partners through technology be able to escape their abuser if you have any form of tech background and i'm talking hey you're dfir you're ocent you worked at a help desk at some point and figured out how to help people

troubleshoot their email you know networking you have the skills to help someone save a life to help save someone's life also if you are someone that is in this situation or you know someone who's in this situation please reach out to me reach out to the organization reach out to anyone in the infosight community that you feel safe doing so they'll lead you to us or another organization there is hope but let's take a step back and i guess continue with my story now i'm not going to talk about my company and this is our technology and a sales pitch but i do need to tell you what we do because this was the beginning of the

journey for me that made me realize how much more that i could become than what i was see at nsur we focus on software genetic mapping what in the world does that mean it means that we look at code and we look at software the way that scientists look at dna you know scientists by the way moderator i think your mic is still on but um we look at software and we break it down into those dna strands the software strands and you know dna is made up of a genome that is made up by genes that is then able to look into your parentage do you have a future where some of your genes

might lead you to get cancer might become malicious genes well you do the same thing with software we break it down and we look at the binaries the libraries the assembly code itself we say hey half of this code comes from the same code base as mirai and a lot of this is from a crypto jacker and you know what some of this is safe code it's all brought in and meshed and mashed and brought into this whole new uh software that can do something new well we're code right like we are born with a set of base code that's how we know how to breathe and our lungs know how to expand and our

heart knows how to beat and we are meant to develop we are meant to learn how to crawl but it seems to be this predefined code that we already have within us if developers can change that and bring in things to make software do what it was never meant to do why can't i do that to myself why can't i take other code bringing it in and be so much more than i thought it could ever be so let's wipe the straight the slate clean and let me reintroduce myself to you hi i'm lo punk and i am a hacker why well i'm not here to tell you about this great sequel injection that i did

or you know what i found the cv or i dropped this oh day no i'm a hacker and you're a hacker because we're born this way we are born with this innate sense of curiosity this imagination you know i picked up a dandelion i didn't look at it and say oh no this is a weed you know let me be real careful and throw it away because more weeds will sprout up i thought they were fairies you know it was blowing them free and they were flying in the sky and i thought you know what because of this because i blew on it my wish will come true and if you didn't do this you know what

you had cars you had capes you made guns out of sticks we created a world in which we were everything but ourselves and we believed in that world that's what a hacker is a hacker isn't a cyber criminal it's not someone who you know defends the network it's not it's someone who has a spark of curiosity to allow them to look at something to allow them to look at a piece of code an application hardware and go i wonder what i could make it do if some of you that are listening are students and i know a lot besides conferences because it's a great place to network and you're thinking well i'm just a student for those of you that

might be listening i believe we might have a little technical issue might be seems like l has frozen so just bear with us for a second and we'll see what we can do here thank you all right hopefully we're back welcome to tech can you hear me so yeah i can hear you yes you're back having rainstorms i am now hot spotting off of my phone so we'll make this work fantastic all right tell me the last thing that you heard because i was just talking to myself the uh the last the last thing you heard you was talking about the whole um blowing on the on the dandelion and whole wish and then you uh was going and

talking about you know who we who we are and who we are not so there we go all right so much for your patience guys like i said we're hackers we're gonna figure this out um okay what i was saying you know it's okay you can stand to hear it twice and that's the fact that we had this imagination when we were kids like i don't know part of me really did believe i could put that cape on and fly yeah part of me believed the world that i'd invented in my mind and that was amazing and things that hopefully maybe you're not hearing twice but if you are great is if you're a student i know a lot of

students come to b-sides conferences in order to you know get we're really friendly here we'll teach you new things we'll bring you on but they come in with a sense of i'm not part of the community i'm not a hacker yet i'm just starting you couldn't be more wrong as a student you are daily you're breaking things you're trying to figure out how to fix them in your deadline is tomorrow so you basically learn how to duct tape that code that's what you've done together in order to get you know just has to hold together long enough to get you that a all spurs from that imagination that want that you have so i'm gonna introduce you to one of my

favorite hackers in the whole wide world and it's not dave kennedy it's not jeff moss it's not ian coldwater so i think that if they saw this hacker they would respect them so much let me introduce you to a slide you're not seeing yet to my edinburgh his name right he is someone that describes himself as being obsessed with the impossible he is obsessed with making the impossible possible he says that the way he thinks is he sees something and he wonders like how can i take it apart how can i crack it open what happens if i modify it if i reprogram it let's take some dictate here and see you can't tell me that you've never had

those thoughts the reason that i believe he is one of the world's backers is because he was sitting watching the news and he heard a story about the sudan mountains and a group of people that live there that live in horrible conditions because they were constantly being bombed and there was this channel a child child by the name of daniel omar and he was out tending his family's flock when bombs fell he couldn't seek shelter fast enough and both of his arms were blown off child was asked later you know what's going on what do you think you'll do from here and he said i wish that i was dead because all that i've become is a burden

to my family and if i heard that news story man i'd be probably as excited as i am now but what could i do right like i would end up trying to look for something that changed my mind look for happy news go you know what could i do what could you do well mike didn't believe in the impossible so he found what he could do he went and found experts that knew about things like physiology prosthetics he went and contacted the guy his name was richard who invented the robo arm pulled them together and let's say it's a think tank he brought in different code from what he had he was an entrepreneur he had the spark

so he brought in other people's knowledge and they invented one of the world's first 3d printed arms he took something that cost ten thousands to fifteen thousand if not more dollars to get those prosthetics and was able to produce it for less than a hundred dollars and he was able to help dang it he didn't stop there he was able to take this technology and take it into the village and teach locals how they could do it themselves i mean google it now you can 3d print a 3d printer so you can 3d print things this is kidding this is why he's a hacker and if you're watching this going like huh that's amazing but i could never do that

i don't have the skills i don't have the network i don't know what to do i can't be that person okay i never asked you to i have never once told you the story and said you should be me or you should be my like that position is taken no that's not you know seeing what white female this you need to be you and you can do great things and if you're sitting there telling me all these reasons then guess what all you're doing gatekeeping yourself you can't have been around this industry for more than i don't know a week without hearing the conversations about gatekeeping and we think about it we think about the

old guard right the people standing in that gate judging whether you are good enough to be a pen test or whether you can code whether you can belong to the infosec family the amount of times that i've been told that i'm just a security fan girl that you know what the only reason i'm here is because i'm marketing or because i'm touting my diversity card or i'm here because who i'm dating or blah blah blah blah blah and this isn't just trolls on the internet i mean this was teammates people who i cared about people who were part of my community sometimes there was another speaker that just didn't get picked or didn't get the

job it was someone that i looked up to what i've realized though now at innova this whole concept of code and thinking of myself as code is you know what they broke into my system they compromised my mind and they infected the code that makes up who i am and so i just got stuck like in a for loop i kept hearing their voices telling me what i could and what i couldn't do and then i just wasn't good enough i created my own little cage and i just stood there staring at the gate going like what am i gonna do i'm not good enough and when i went to b side scholars station and i heard a talk by jason a

straight he was talking about gatekeeping and he said you all are hackers who care about the front gate just the freaking fence and i'll tell you a little bit more about it later but when i was listening to the talk i was in a bad place i was in a place where my fear had affected my mental health to the point that it had affected my physical health i wasn't looking at that front gate trying to get in i was looking at that front gate trying desperately to get out well i hopped the fence and by that i mean i quit my job with no background plan nothing else in the line uh three kids we like eating but we're

gonna figure it out my mental health and my well-being was more important at that time than that paycheck and when you're unemployed you have a lot of time to think about things and research them and try to figure out what you're going to do next and as i'm looking at infosec stuff and looking at jobs i kept seeing this one image right this is the guy fury mask it's supposed to be what frightens us the evil hacker the cyber criminal that represents everything that we should fear and i looked at it and i'm like this isn't some criminal somewhere else when i look at the mirror that's what i'm seeing i have become my own worst enemy and as a part of this

you always see the anonymous slogan that we are anonymous we are legion we do not forgive and we do not forget the words of terrifying nemesis right this talk isn't about anonymous i they do what they do i'm worried about myself and somehow in this saying i found hope i found the light it's the whole concept of we are anonymous i spent so much time trying to be in the limelight like look at me look what i've learned i can do these things you should respect me that i lost my way i lost my journey look i don't care what you think about me i know my skills and i know where i want to go

that's okay it is okay not to be known as long as you're happy with what you're doing when i look back at my career right now because there's this thing right here it fight to tell you what i loved the most is the people i've mentored after giving a talk i went down to the vendor area and i'm hanging out and there's this guy that just kind of kept looking at me and complete transparency i got freaked out so i go to the red hat booth where i have friends and i'm hiding behind the open shift guys going like how do i get out of here and i see a woman go grab him by his arm

and drag him over to the booth and he looks at me and it's broken english not because of an accent but because you could tell that he's trying to formulate his questions and he's like you know are you l yes oh marcus yeah that's me he's like you changed my life what he's like i took your container course and it was so simple and i could understand it so i took the next one and then i knew docker so then i went and took another one i didn't know what they were saying so i took a different one because i knew i could understand because i got a visa i came to america i have a job i brought my children over

there in american schools i brought my mama you've changed my entire family tree that's amazing to hear but you know what that wasn't me i put some stuff out there that i thought was interesting to teach some people he changed his programming he changed what he thought was hardwired he changed his children's lives and they he changed his mama's life too because i am more than sure she was extremely proud of what he managed i interviewed at inazure me to the test because the ceo looked right into the camera and said what are you most proud of i'm looking for a job here right i should tell him something that i stand out with i spoke at dockercon i can do this like

this is why you should hire me but we're anonymous and i'm okay with that so i was brave i said this isn't the answer that you want the truth is that i am most proud of the work that my mentees have accomplished and i'm not going to tell you what that is i'm not going to tell you who they are but i am going to tell you through their accomplishments i have become so much more than i ever thought i could be i tell you all this to issue you a challenge what i want you to do is to help me hack the planet challenge yourself be okay with failure be okay with people knowing that you've failed be okay being

behind the scenes and people not even going with what you've tried yes getting a job is important you know what maybe to get that job you need a little bit of notoriety but if you don't love what you're doing and you don't do it for yourself you're gonna burn out so quickly take this from personal experience that you are change your code change it one life at a time reach out to people learn from their code base my brain just works this way like all right they contributed to the code base i'm looking at it do i want to merge this with me or you know what i think they're a little bit infectious i'm just

not going to take that take in what you need let the rest go it's like that guy said he understood my courses the other course he had no idea what they were talking to he moved on that's okay that's not failure that's growth when i started out my career i was a system administrator i sucked so bad and it wasn't because i didn't have the skills i didn't care i didn't want to try i hated it so why would i be good at it and when i look at this and i think back and i'm talking to you right now i've said this over and over and over and i'm about to say it no frills nothing a blank slide

you are a hacker i am a hacker we write the story that becomes our life it's about a year into being a cis admin my mentor comes to me and he says look you hate this job everybody knows that you hate this job what do you want to do take away barriers take away everything that you're telling yourself you can't do if you were to design that job what would it be and i thought for a moment i said i want to be a technical booth babe now some of you may have cringed and thought like wow you just put feminism back out on how many years how could you take a step back don't

keep me this is my dream i'm not asking you to you know live it yourselves but what i meant i want to be that girl i wanted to be the girl you know what screw it i'm in heels i'm in a dress i'm rocking my look i'm working the booth and the well you know actually guy comes up i could stand my ground that was my research that was my code and i knew it in 2019 i was so happy you know what i found out that does not oh well you know actually guy up just somehow makes them louder and by january of 2020 i was spiraling hated my job so much the people around me i swear to you to

this moment were dedicated to making me feel worthless like that everything i'd accomplished meant nothing and not to you know tout myself but i want you to understand i've spoken at dockercon i've lead mentorship programs i've spoken at openstack i'd accomplished things that i was proud of and what they were telling me is well we'll believe in you once you stop speaking at these smaller conferences you've never spoken ignite you've never spoken at um reinvent all the things that i had never done is what they touted what i couldn't do they built that gate around me to the point where my self-dignity wasn't behind a fence that i could jump it was behind a freaking

vault door that i couldn't get into so it was time to pivot i needed something else i've jumped the fence i still need to get into that bolt so let's try social engineering like i said you write your code i write my application of who i am so why not add a few functions that are intended to get to your outcome after all if they're too busy watching the woman in the red dress then why would they even know what i was doing i'm gonna tell you all a secret that actually only a few people know i am extremely introverted and people don't tend to believe that because i come out and i do things like this and being introverted

isn't not being able to talk to people it's what happens afterwards it's going back to your room and reliving every time in here and focusing on i didn't make the point when i rambled not not what i wanted to do you see me sitting here in front of you with all this makeup and the hair and the defcon jacket i am freaking peacocking the hell out of this because elle el can try as much as she can but i'm quiet and i'm shy and i get embarrassed really easily and i took everything that they said and at the core it became who i was so i invented a persona a brand i invented yellow punk

and somewhere along the way i learned to like slide it on like like a roll that i was playing you know you sit there and you're putting on your makeup and you're doing your hair go on stage the whole world is a stage after all right and l was burned out hell was tired elle couldn't stand up for herself but ella [ __ ] that i don't care what you think about me i'm gonna push boundaries i'm gonna distract you while goes around and figures out what she's doing and when i got home look i fell off of a stage during a presentation once do you know how much that would have mortified me but that wasn't me i took off my makeup

i shed the skin i was mom yeah that was a really funny episode that happened to l punk i wonder what will happen next it almost seems split personality but i'm telling you i've spoke so many people in this community that have to be out there that have the same persona i mentored someone who was terrified of public speaking and so he was a big role player and he had his arm during role playing and so now he wears it under his suit jacket and he doesn't care he's a big tough barbarian he's going to go get this done change your code right the funk you know little secret easter eggs that people might not know about

get you so excited become your own ello punk now i'm not telling you that it's going to be easy it's not to a certain sense ella punk is who i am and i notice it right like when i start talking about it i sit up straighter i look at the camera more i'm more opinionated than i normally am and i could do that without this makeup but it's like a security blanket even what two days ago i came to the dow attacker i'm seeing my friends i'm seeing my family i'm the adopted daughter from san antonio so i showed up in shirts and the t-shirt and i walked in the room and there are so

many people people flew in for this meetup and i got scared i'm not a little punk like i tried but i didn't have my safety blended so i ran upstairs and i hid in the very back table and i got through it and i actually had a hell of a lot of fun and i did that because the next part we are legion you are not alone in this community you're not having to reinvent the whale even if this is your first conference and the closest thing you've ever done to infostart is talk to your professor join twitter there's a lot of us out there and there's a lot of us that are willing to stand up for each other

this is a small part of my tribe people who have stood up for me when i didn't have the strength to put up my you know to stand up for myself i'm not gonna attribute each contribution to each person because i think a lot of them are happy being anonymous but one of these people on the slide or in my community when i was looking for the new job i was not qualified to work it is like some of them will tell you like oh this was an experiment like elle knew nothing about software engineering or malware or fellow punk could cut on that front that you know what i can learn it no i don't

know now but i can learn like let's do this and i put on a whole presentation to talk about a company and i tweeted out does anyone know anything about reverse power engineering let me give you my presentation and halfway through they're like yeah that's not right like that that's nowhere what it actually is and they sat down and they helped me hammer out that presentation that was due the next day the first time i went to deaf club i went by myself and it was terrifying and one of these people stood up and dragged me to things and just kind of became my guide even though they'd never met me one of the things that i am most famous

most well known for is my it's okay to be new campaign the concept that if you're not new you're you're not new you're stagnant and you need to get away because kubernetes has a release cycle openstack does too the cloud is constantly changing you have to be new to something and it's a scary thing to admit so one of these came out to me and said hey will you write the forward to my book to help you know really push that out there yes these things that brought me into the limelight but they were things that helped me solidify right that part of me that kept telling me that people thought i wasn't good enough

they brought in trusted code it was somebody that i truly trusted that helped me understand you know what you've been compromised let's kill up that vulnerability and get you going the biggest thing that i really learned through all of this through knowing that i'm anonymous and that's okay through knowing that we are legion we are a community we will contribute to each other we will build each other up is the hardest thing to accept and that's the we do not forgive and we do not forget we're horrible to you yes but at the end of the day is it really the troll on the other side of the screen that's getting to you that's reminding you things or is it

doing it to yourself after all we have the concept of i could tell you right now mistakes that i made at a talk in 2018 every time i misspoke the look on the face of back when he realized i misspoke when my slide didn't work when i realized that i am presenting and teaching on something that wasn't right look it's get i'm getting into my own head right now you might be able to watch it find somebody who was that talk in 2018 they probably don't remember my name hopefully remember some of what they learned they definitely do not remember when i stuttered when i misspoke i might have a fun something remembrance of learning that what i said wasn't

right it's me it's you that do not forget your failures we focus on them going back to the concept of code i always say that we end up taking those failures and just writing a loop out of them and never putting an in statement we just keep going through it and through it and through it again to the point where we've rewritten our that malicious intent i've presented a whole lot of problems to you and hopefully a different way to view it but what kind of talk would this be if i didn't provide you with some actual call to action steps that you can take so let's help you rewrite your code with that being understood remember you

are your architect you are your developer you can take these you can leave them but it's your story that you have to live with so the first part is you have to unders not knowing is not defeat the whole concept of it's okay to be new the moment you know the answer to everything man learn something new you're stagnant you are not going to get any further and eventually tech is going to outgrow you what is the greatest defeat the greatest failure is not even trying i have failed at so many things i i mean just a whole section called fail stack where we call those for failed deployments and it's not that i'm proud of my failure i'm proud of the

things that i learned because of my failure during a job interview i can be like yeah i built this thing it was really cool i can be like all right i tried to build my lab and you have no idea of a bakery it was so bad but then i figured out that i could do this and this and that excitement comes out and they let you know that you are really truly in what you're doing you're not chasing that paycheck not that the paycheck is a bad thing with that being said is find your passion and then learn from that but i learned to code so bad like real life code like sit down

and be that magician that pulls parts things together and writes an actual app writes an actual application that can help other people i want that so bad i suck so bad at being a coder being a developer because i don't have the time and to be honest with you as much as i want it to happen i don't want to sit down and do all of these things over and over again because that's not where my passion is however get me trying to do some pin testing or get write a talk i gave a talk the other day on fileless malware with two weeks worth of experience in it why because i spent 19 hours a day

delving into it it was fascinating that's where my passion is your outcome is going to be directly affected with what and how much you care about something also your perspective is valuable there are a hundred mentoring talks out there there are probably a lot of talks about gatekeeping and people's personal stories so why am i doing this one because my story is different because i lived it because my view this whole thing on code is different maybe it's resonating with some of you some of you might be able to say what i have two weeks of experience tell me about it tell me how you got started the bridge worked the foundation that you laid

because maybe i don't have to repeat those steps maybe i think of something in a new way your perspective and your are what is going to help our community grow it's going to help raise the next batch of hackers who embrace the fact that they're hackers and at the same time diversity is our strength and that's not just gender i hate it when people tell me that my diversity is because of the gender i was born with you know what my diversity is also that i grew up in mexico mexico uh i came here when i was seven years old i didn't really speak the language i didn't have as part of my background i

was feeling playing with the horses to a sense people say it's a social economic disadvantage i don't see it as a disadvantage because to me that's what raised my curiosity but i am different in that sense i also have neurodiversity i think that's the new term that we're using and i'm not going to talk too much on that because my son's coming up in the industry and he's like mom some things are better private for me and our family so i'm going to honor that um based on my experiences in the way that i think i've using the whole concept of how i view code i don't care who you are what your race is

you have different experiences and therefore you're going to have a different way of looking at things when i interview people is one of the things that i said right you have a set of questions you interview three people person a and b get ten questions right person c only gets five and it's the last five that the other two got wrong most people are going to hire a person a and b why i'm in a person either a or b and person c because those put together give me a fuller picture embrace your differences don't try to be like everyone else in the community and that's because i'm getting very close to the end of this talk i promise

and i'll get to your questions is that our pride is what tells us that is impossible we are so afraid of failing again of having people see our failure of having people call us out and tell us why we don't belong that's your pride put that aside be anonymous in what you're doing yes it's risky our experience tells us that we're gonna fail my favorite quote ever comes from westwood ho and that's from samuel beckett and he says ever tried ever no matter try again fail again but fail better you know you'll never believe what you can accomplish by attempting the impossible with the courage to repeatedly fail better the impossible is just that someone

hasn't discovered the way to make it possible or fail 100 times and let somebody else take that code base and make it work like i could fly was a dream until someone invented the plane you know i can fly with a dream until someone did the little squirrel suit where you can jump off and you're flying and you're gliding you guys get the point and that's it you get the point it's not pointless all it is is a journey so you are a hacker and if you really are then why not give it a try what do you have to lose you already can't do it what now you no you can't do it and you try

again it it's not the end of the world i've recently had the honor of becoming an advocate for hacking is not a crime and i understand right hacking is not a crime means that we are all hackers we have blue teamers the difference between a criminal and you know a hacker is consent but i take it one step further when it comes to myself and i will hopefully you'll do too because when it comes to trying something new and trying to reinvent it when i'm l i'm sitting back right now screw the makeup and everything i'm being ill with you guys it's hard i don't want to fail i know people in this community i know people

that are seeing me and i feel like i basically become a criminal everything that they've taught me and i fail at it and i embarrass them and i hate that because my community you all have been there so many times for me to start crying sorry and that's because when i didn't believe in myself i became true you helped me be the legion legend legend legion sorry i wonder how long i've been doing that um i i became so much more because of you all i have become who i am because of this community so in a sin being a little punk again if there is a crime that i have committed then let me steal from the

hacker manifesto and say you know what my crime was that of curiosity so before i start crying let me go and bring this to an end and i'd be happy to answer any questions about this talk or just infosec as a whole that you may have moderator back to you hopefully my connection didn't just go down

i can't hear you all right maybe i can't hear him

oh my god thank you rose i'm just going to start going through the thing here um can you hear me now yes we can hear you now all right yes it's just the whole refresh recess you have to go through okay i was saying there's so much unpack there we do have a few minutes for anyone who has um questions um if uh anything is frozen on your end and you can hear just refresh your screen um just refresh your screen and that should uh that should bring you back live don't know why that's happening but that's okay all right um fantastic let me see i'm going through if you have any questions please share

uh one of the comments somebody say that defcon might be live this year it is i will be there like jason will be there my mentor will be there like not that you all know who my mentor is but whatever y'all know my life like there's gonna be a big part of us there and if you can't join online i was online last year i man it's amazing how much you can learn by just watching and not being distracted by everything else that's happening at vegas but i hope to see you there if you are there uh uh yeah definitely uh you can still hear me right that okay fantastic um l there was uh you know you got some

very good great comments here um and and you know just you just did an excellent job i it was so cute when did you i got to ask this because the the way you did this presentation you weaved all of these encouraging statements with your life but you you connected it with you know code and and and hacking and you look used a lot of scenarios from uh you know some of the movies and and some of the um uh favorite sayings i mean how did you develop this because it's really it was very very insightful and very unique i think i i think it all came together during that burnout period yeah you know i had i did have an ego

maybe i still do i don't know maybe i just learned to drop it a bit but when you're industry you want to be good right you want to stand out you want to be that person that discovers the oday or is the best one in your company and so we all put on personas but we don't always put on good personas and i found the more that i talked to people and the more that i shared part of my story the more that they went oh i'm not the only one you know that's just not me and so at some point in this last year i've made the decision that i'm gonna live my life openly because

the bad and the good and that means sharing where i failed and not being ashamed of it and the community has really responded and offered me strength through all that so i've spent a lot of time reflecting on the mistakes that i've made how i can make it better and i i speak in scenarios i understand things through stories so that's how i've solidified just understanding my story understanding how my mindset changed when i understood code reviews my mind works in the way that when i think of myself as code what happens makes sense how i pull people in and pull their information just makes sense for me that might not make sense to some of you that are listening

but find your story and man just love it share it just that i love this community and i'm so excited now and it's insane to think that a year ago i was willing to walk away from all of it wow wow hey you know what there's two words that just stick out it's authenticity and transparency when just listening to you talk and there's no doubt that there's there's enough passion there so my curiosity of course is do you um have you encountered in your journey those in our community that are not transparent or not authentic or authentic with themselves or with others in terms of sharing one of the and i'm sorry if i look like

i'm laughing i don't mean to but i honestly don't know how to process it is meeting people who are who are regarded that way and then asking them like this is amazing how did you do this like just being so curious and i realized they can't explain it to me and they're tripping over their words and i'm just like you don't know either you're just really good at faking it and that's cool but now you've kind of hurt the rest of us because we believed in you and we believe what you've said and now i'm kind of doubting what you've said um one of the coolest moments i ever had being a talk and god i'm not gonna cry i

was writing a talk oh my god i could not understand this issue and somebody tagged in kaminsky and he got into my dms and here is this god amongst hackers i'm sorry teaching me at this low level like basic stories encouraging me i said something goes oh god that way what like those are the people we should be looking for i hate subject matter experts because to me that just means that they're putting on a persona that they know everything that there is there is too much of this in this industry like don't look up to those people look up to the people who are going i screwed up let me tell you what happened and let me teach you from it

yeah it's almost like uh you know i hear the young people say can you just can you just keep it real just keep it real just all this other stuff is just just i don't know just some fabrications and and and a wall i don't understand you just break it down make it make it make sense and and and i think one thing that you said is being able to share your mistakes you know you you and and being able to articulate you know where you were why you did what you did how you made that mistake and then how you move from that i think there's this we need a little bit more of that

also what do you think now one thing i want on that line but i forgot to say and maybe i should say right now is i'm sure there are a lot of people who are looking for a new infosec job on students and they're so afraid of that interview because they're like what happens when they ask me a question that i don't know i mean that is the most fearful i've done quite a few job interviews on the side of being the person interviewing and yeah they put me in there as a person who's like oh i don't know that let me ask you know i'm the straw man but i'm okay with that your interview

does not start until you've said i don't know two times i don't care what you've memorized i mean what your background is that's pretty cool where you're starting once you've said it twice it means you're no longer comfortable and it means i get to learn how you think i get to learn how you troubleshoot i now know what you're going to be like you know everything hits the fan and everything's burning and welcome to infosec where everything's on fire and i'm going to learn if you are somebody that's going to be a hindrance to the team because you're trying to front like everything or if you're somebody like i don't know let's figure this out

let me dive in because i can train you but i can't teach you how to have that mindset so i don't know if that answers your question but i think that's something really important for people to hear that that's important i remember on a particular uh my first job in cyber uh at a sock it wasn't exactly set up you know where it was really conducive to training and and they didn't matter of fact they didn't have individuals that was training me so i was kind of out there doing you know just just floundering and i realized that the uh the shift that i was on the person wasn't able to train me but i

met people on the other shift and right after me that were willing so i asked you know i remember asking the manager hey can i come in later you know so i can stay over and and and rub elbows with the the individuals that that can just show me how to do these things and how to break stuff down and i think you know i think in in jobs where you know you might find some frustration if you come up with a solution i think it's very it's it's important to be able to share that how to how to to be successful which with the managers in charge you know so that um you know you just

don't feel like you're floundering or that you're being overlooked you're or the the person that's supposed to be training you is not training you yeah does it make sense no it does and it's almost heartbreaking um i want to address one comment in the chat a minute but let me i guess tell you this story i was six months in to being a linux admin i had no technical background my technical background was a six month boot camp me going to an interview and going like i don't know but let me tell you this you know experiences and all this and for some crazy reason i was expected and allowed to be a linux system

administrator with six months on fortune 500 company servers i don't know what they were thinking but i had a ticket review written for myself where colleague all he wrote was i could automate you like how insane is that talking about impostor syndrome and my proudest moment or one of them was actually being able to walk up to him him saying something similar and being like yeah man i can't believe i don't know that i can't believe you haven't taught me that and just like turning it around on them you have to find the people that are willing to teach and not the people who are just willing to call you out on your flaws and somebody there's a lot of us that

struggle with imposter syndra let me give you right now the solution to imposter syndrome cool what like what changes you're still here you still have the job you're still learning okay you're an imposter that's your syndrome move on get your job i'm faking it right now like i'm just out here telling you my story i don't have a psychology degree but i know what i know so put your cat ears on the way i do and get your job done there's this you know uh this was fantastic uh caprice said earlier your words resonate so well because that is self-reflection and we must indulge to understand the path we are walking and find clarity and

thought to be able to know where to go next most of the time in the noise we get lost uh awesome awesome okay man whoever that is write a talk you are so well spoken that you're gonna think so much better than me like yes go do it even if it's a fireside talk teach us in those words hey capri you heard that i just read your words capri brian that was good and uh and ellie you are not rambling at all trust me you there's a you're making a whole lot of sense and uh and and and just judging from some some of the uh the the positive well now all the positive comments you know it's just

wonderful um screw it you've already made it keep faking it make more you if you are here you have made it congratulations welcome to the hacker drive i i have announced that you have now made it there you go there we go um you said a lot and then what you know it's interesting there's one there's two words that you know i've heard as i was growing up self-esteem you know you didn't work you exactly use that word but you know or those those two words but there was a whole lot of stuff that you talked about in terms of building yourself up in terms of reaching out you know to the community and you then you

talked about how the community was uh individuals within the community was so helpful and you know and it it just it's amazing that you know you didn't really use that but you you are talking about just being uh enjoying who you are recognizing who you are and you know loving who you are within this community with business field within this community which uh which which some people can see uh on the outside it might seem it could be seen daunting at times yeah i some advice that i've been given before especially growing up was you know you build your self-esteem don't let other people impact impacted that you know like sticks and stones and no like my community

not strong enough to be myself when i look it said i saved my life because i'm hoping that some of you saw that that's how dark my hole was that i i didn't know i'm starting i'm sorry that i didn't know if i have to live like i failed so bad how was i gonna feed my kids it was that spiral and so they came in and they didn't tell me i was good enough they listened they helped give me solutions they hey have we tried this you know what let's do some paired programming let's they help me build that self-esteem and i said i wasn't going to name people but you know what bryson from scythe

that man was a godsend he invited me to things he was teaching me yoga he helped me get out of my own head even though i've never met him he just saw somebody be open about needing help not only do you need to find those people but look if you're listening to this please be that person you might say i don't know enough well have somebody teach you help them build their self-worth because you know what sticks and stones might not break my words but let me tell you words definitely hurt so words can also definitely help um so yeah take away the whole misnomer that your self-esteem is only you i'm telling you yeah that's wrong i wish

that it didn't affect us but malicious code can affect us through vulnerabilities and guess what we're all vulnerable awesome now as you became you know as you evolved or be you know and and and switch the code and and put the code that's going to help you function much better uh and become more effective and efficient you're doing something that it seems like many of us and many of those are listening should also become you this is an example really of giving back now you talk about you know even though maybe being nervous and rambling and all that but it certainly it makes everything that you says makes sense so the giving back is so important don't you think for

for those who are going through this journey also and be and actually begin to you know recognize and accept who they are that you don't know something until you can teach it um i think the security field for six months that's it that is i mean i i ran conferences i did mentorship talks i took my security plus like i don't know nine months ago that was my look i had a i could begin to believe but because i was at b-side san antonio four years ago schlepping tables i have volunteered at so many things i now run bc san antonio and ram track the texas cyber summit and i don't have to know everything at that

point i'm just helping facilitate others and that helps and man my work with operation safe escape there is never doubting to this world because i see it those feelings are gone so yeah if you're feeling like you can't make it there's dark places we can go giving back will help you realize your your help that you can give to the community and it'll also help you learn a lot of things along the way i'm preaching a lot i'm sorry i just truly believe that every person on this call and on this talk can do so much good for our community absolutely right and you know what it is okay to preach because if you're saying words and and and

giving and providing advice that resonates for even for the congregation that's listening to that preacher they're sitting there and they're hanging on every word it's the preachers or the talkers or the assets you say the smes that are talking and yapping that you just like just why why are they talking this this is this is not working for me so you know yeah we're hanging on you everywhere yeah you did an excellent job and if and if it's okay you know i'm you know i mean you're from mexico but if it's okay i want to adopt you as you know they say uh you know other uh um um i gotta adopt you as a sister if

you'll accept my invitation because it's just you did an excellent job i guess i got a sister from mexico we are all family come on you're all right that's what i'm talking about oh fantastic fantastic you know i don't see i don't see too many uh actually there's no questions um all the great comments um it was a great chat uh this has been one of the better talks today uh we need more talks like this oh wow yeah that's that's uh that's good that's good stuff um so you know somebody way back and a while ago it takes all the courage to be candid and open absolutely well um i any any you've said

a lot um i took so many notes here that i'm gonna to uh to to just keep and put in my little journal uh most definitely um anything any final thoughts anything you said that that or thought about that you could have said that you didn't that you wanted to share still got about four minutes here all right the tldr of this talk and if you're checking your email you're messing with your kids whatever it is you know because i know from home just look at the camera for a second you belong in this community you are good enough you will give back you will fail so many times and it will be glorious and you will

learn and you'll be keep giving back so what you need to take away from the talk is you are good enough you are strong you are worthy and you're already part of our community that's it l um i am blessed to have been just a a little part of of uh being able to uh bring not bring you on they brought you on and just be here and hear all of this and share so it has been if nobody else got anything out of it trust me there's a you have a convert right here so i so much appreciate um all your words your advice your knowledge and your wisdom and your uh your transparency it was it

was certainly awesome so um so um it's now what time i have i have 2 27. um i'm just going to say i think i'm not sure if any other workshops for those of you that who are still listening um i think there's still a couple of workshops that don't have the schedule in front of me and um you know so feel free to uh to poke around i guess there's a couple of networking opportunities um in on the platform so um if you're still free to uh have some time see please join the community um and definitely take uh you know hopefully was taking notes and take all these words of wisdom that else

shared um you know and apply it to your life there's uh being real and understanding yourself and knowing who you are and learning and growing and not being afraid uh to push through and and leaning on others these are this is this is all good stuff hell yeah don't be afraid to reach out seriously there's my email there's like i'm just a person like if i can help you let me know or i know people that can so just use it abuse it there you go okay everybody hopefully you took a screenshot of uh of her um email up there reach out to ll and i guess the other one is the is that the twitter one yeah

at l o punk yeah okay was taken i got it all right thank you so much l everybody thank you for joining and uh we'll see you later all right bye