 All right, so let's get started as always my intro is up on the screen All right, so this is me and Some of you know me as this and this and this and this but lately things have gotten a little bit crazy for me See I quit my job Yeah Sold all my stuff Packed up my wife and four kids and moved from here To here which looks real nice on that little map, but that is just insane That's 21 and a half hours in the air to be with you people so All right, now some of you might be asking, you know Uganda, what's up with that? Well, don't don't be so harsh upon Uganda. I mean they've got rules just like anywhere else Says do not urinate here fine of 50,000 I can still get breakfast out and I can still get lunch and drive through and I can even go to a drive through chicken Place if I'm interested We've got a cozy little place in the country With a shiny, but prickly red gate Where a man named Joseph looks after things for us? We lost our minivan, but gained a sturdy truck. We also gained a few pets. This is Fred and This was Tony. He had a posse We got a cat to deal with a posse though This is Africa though, you know, this is like the circle of life, right? So what eats cats That's what we got to deal with next But we we do have a best buy and we have a safe way and a Walmart and Target and A mall We have all the modern conveniences. I mean our place is so great. Even my kids stuffed animals have net access All right, that one was pushing it Now we really do have internet access though if there's an equation to it you actually add this plus this plus this To get something that looks like this To get something that looks like this YouTube's awesome at 10k This is all the downloads you'll ever need anyway, especially if you live in the 70s. Well, we have very nice neighbors Here's our neighbors. They're really sweet and the country's great But unlike any other place it has its share of problems. Our problems are just a little more dangerous than others All right, so this begs some very obvious questions. This is probably the first one and and That that question is pretty valid I mean after all I've achieved some level of success in this industry as an author and a Media personality and a public speaker. I had a dream job and a wonderful family and I had it made and of course now I'm unemployed and living off of donations and Most importantly pretty happy See I had lots of stuff I had the fame and the cool job and the free beer and the rock star friends But even with all of this stuff. I was pretty miserable The good thing is I figured out what my problem was my problem was I didn't feel like my life counted for a whole lot In fact, I didn't feel like I was making much of a difference at all Whether in life or in this industry or whatever and my goal today is to save you from that fate and give you some advice So that's the that's the point of this talk now to explain explain how this all happened properly I've got to tell you my life story and parts of it are going to be embarrassing So I was a pretty innocent kid and that was the only time I ever wore leader hose and I swear But underneath that gentle exterior there lurked a dark side and My fascination with computers started here with the TRS 80. I didn't in fact own one of these. I actually borrowed it It was in the mall, you know, they'd have these things out and you could use them And what I would do is I would go to the library and get basic programming books and write basic programs on a pad of paper Take it to the mall. Try them out if it didn't work. I'd use my eraser, you know, it's very complex debugger. I Upgraded to the TI just the Bill Cosby computer and took backyard programming lessons Under a tree with my black and white TV Took programming lessons and this was an interesting time. This was when computers were like magic I don't know if any of you remember that time. It was like when you knew how to code Right when when you understood how these things worked you were special, you know, you talked a different language This was this was a very cool time Well, I got an upgrade my upgrade path went from this to this the Commodore 64 And of course it came with a modem which is running at about the same speed. I'm running at now so some Things don't change, but the modem actually opened a lot of doors for me. No pun intended I found bbs's, you know bulletin board systems and I found this community of people who were just like me And even though I couldn't put my finger on what exactly that was bulletin boards defined that for me These people were hackers they were brilliant mischievous but open and The things that they did were a little bit different. They thought outside the box push the envelope of technology and solve difficult problems elegantly This was a really interesting group So I took the information that I found there and you know tinkered and experimented and learned I just took everything in and before long this became my identity This was my first identity and it didn't exactly gel with my conservative Christian upbringing, but nonetheless, I was a hacker It's how I was wired So even though at 12 I looked like this I Had a dream that one day I would look something like this And I would be a spy or something and I would I would creep around my neighborhood at night with Legos made into spy gear like some cyber ninja You know hunting my digital prey But in reality, I was just you know an average guy. I did no homework. I aced all my tests That gave me a solid C average everything about me was average Well, my dad brought home a 386 and I learned Windows and Linux I ripped that machine apart so many times I lost count so I could learn how to heart how the hardware worked I did the same with the software Took the black and white TV that was in my basement and jacked up the band so high that I was in the 900 megahertz range listening to sell conversations Say you could do that back then Took a scanner and this is all with information that I got online from the community I took a scanner and wired a digital out to it so that I could hook it into my sound card So I could pull down pager information pox ag and flex some of you might remember that stuff I was looking at people's pager data One time I got a I got an interesting page and I checked out the IP address and it routed back to none other than the White House And I realized I was getting the CIS admins pages that worked at the White House and I knew when the firewall went down Now how I know that it failed open is a different story. I'll leave that alone But like these socks that I saw one time there were no boundaries to the knowledge that I could gain in this community It was just it was unbelievable. In fact, I learned so much from the hacking community that I eventually dropped out of college Because the crap they were trying to feed me was utterly ridiculous. They wanted me to learn RPG and cobalt Anybody that remembers those hideous languages will start twitching. It was evil and I said, why do I have to learn this crap? They said well, it's for writing business reports and I said well I know Fortran and see I could write your stupid business reports in that and of course They didn't want to hear that because of course they were the RPG and cobalt teachers And that would just make them not matter So I dropped out of college and I ended up getting my dream job with CSC And they made little pictures like this for their newsletter and quotes like this Which made me realize that I had in fact achieved my dream That I got paid to break into buildings to break past network security to do all the cool stuff that I used to make up When I was 12 years old and pictures like this were pretty common. This was us. This was our team This was strike force. We did we did assessments against the government. We did commercial assessments We did physical stuff getting past guards. I mean this was incredibly sexy work This was this was great work So the dream had come true This this picture did end up being me in the super cyber ninja stuff that I dreamed about when I was 12 was absolutely real But it wasn't enough. I wanted more and as you can tell from this picture If you look very closely at the t-shirt You can tell what I was thinking see even though I had this dream job with strike force to me I wanted more I wanted fame. I wanted recognition and the way that you got that back in the late 80s Was you got an article published in frack and you spoke at Def Con Once you did those two things you made it So in 1998 I posted my first frack article under a pseudonym little thing on steganography and then a few years later in 2003 I got my first speaking slot at Def Con 11. The talk was called watching the watchers. How many people saw that? Show of hands. I'm really sorry See the reason I'm sorry is that I knew the famous guys the famous guys back in the day that had that Certain something that was a little bit different on stage and in the way that they presented themselves, right? these guys had you know, so a certain flair and I tried to emulate them I took little pieces of each one of the people and not all of them are listed here But I took a little piece of each one of them and I tried to be that Now imagine I don't have the graphics capability to do this properly But imagine morphing all of these people into one person Yeah, no offense to any of them individually, but that's pretty hideous and That's what my 2003 presentation was it was absolutely hideous because it wasn't me in fact the presentation sucked and This phase of my life was all about me Trying to be someone else, but it was me focused on me me trying to be something So I got back from From Def Con in 2003 and I was absolutely desperate see because I had gotten to the top of my career I had achieved my dreams I had validated everything that I stood for by speaking at Def Con and being published in frack I had the top of that. I got to the top of the ladder and I realized the view sucked. I Didn't get invited to any parties You know, I didn't have any groupies Well, I had one but it was a homeless guy that wasn't actually supposed to be at the conference And I wanted him to go to go away But I don't know what it was. Maybe it was desperation But I fell back on my Christian upbringing and turned my life over to Christ and some of you remember this I posted on my website that I am a Christian Now this was rather significant because to me this was suicide This was me turning my back on my career and saying I'll do shrubbery. I don't care I haven't found fulfillment in my job This sucks. I've done it on my own long enough. I'm done and my prayer was pretty simple I remember it clearly it was do something with my life and I like to think that God answered that prayer because Three weeks later Singers came to me and said we saw that talk you did would you be interested in writing a book on Google hacking? It took me six months to decide to write it and three months to actually write it and it absolutely took off Now this wasn't anything I invented This wasn't stuff that I came up with this was other people stuff In fact a lot of the book had queries in it from other people on the web that had submitted them You know and I give attribution to that and everything but the point is this was the community This was knowledge from the community But this was an absolute gift That was the first book the second book grifter came to me and said hey You want to help me out with my book? That was the second book Then Aaron came to me and said hey you want to help me out with my book That was my third book and then Bruce you remember Bruce from the slides back there said I'm working on this book You want to help me with this book? And then I pulled together some experts and then wrote this book and then came the rock star series Singers asked me to write on stealing which was where all the rock stars were and I was like holy crap I mean these were guys that I looked up to and it was really intimidating to be involved in that But this was absolutely overkill. I mean this was like a rocket ride It turned into this Dozen book projects a landslide of press appearances all over the place and my life blew up 100% this was an interesting time for me. I'm not even gonna get into all the celebrity sightings Yes, that's vanilla ice and Jenny McCarthy in Paris Hilton. These were weird times But life was good You know I was back at the peak But the simple fact was I was on the peak again, and I was miserable See somewhere in the madness I lost touch and I fell into the same exact trap that I fell into in 2003 my focus had shifted back to me It's the title of this talk me to we my focus was on me again and Some really bad things happened in my life during this time I had been given this crazy forum on my website that went from 500 users to like 80,000 users in like three months It just exploded and there was one guy that was on the forum Who's named our God how many people show of hands remember our God a Few of you okay. Well the what what happened was I stopped visiting my own forums because I was busy writing books Not good books like the ones that I listed there But crappy books just so I could get my name on more books focused on me again and our God who was my number one poster Disappeared he vanished and I found out like a year later that he died and That this was a kid who for the last months of his life was confined to a wheelchair in his room Cranking out PHP exploits at the tune of like three a day Posting him on my site and he was like one of the first guys that posted Google Dorks on his exploits on his web exploits So here's the exploit and here's how you find targets on Google He was like the guy that started that I had a guy die on my watch on my forums And I didn't even know and he was busy boosting my Presence in the industry that was that was tough for me and it got me got me thinking that was That was our God So it was a It was a bad time But my focus was about to change and that happened when my wife Jen went to Uganda for the first time and some of you Remember this this piece of the story she went to Uganda she brought back pictures like this This is Colin and she showed me this picture in every single picture. She showed me of Colin He was smiling that big goofy smile and he's completely butt naked, which is why I take the shot that way And he's butt naked because he doesn't like own any clothes his parents are both dead one from malaria one from AIDS He lives with his grandmother in a pretty little house like this. This is Colin and She shot video of this kid dancing and jumping and singing He was the happiest kid in the world and he had nothing and I had everything and I was miserable And I didn't know what was up with that So I said I figured I got to go to Uganda and see what is up with this because he's got something that I don't It's expensive and the way that you do these kind of mission trips as you tell people you're going and they help you well All of my friends were online. I didn't have like any, you know, IRL friends Mine were mine were all digital So I sent some emails and it got blogged and hackers paid for our mission trip to Uganda Africa some of you remember this Well the folks in Uganda that we worked with that was a OET they found out I was a computer guy And they're like you're gonna do computer stuff I'm like rock on so we cleaned up some computers and put together a little computer lab And I took a handful of wireless cards and I pulled their office together into a wireless network And I was proud of this picture Google loading wirelessly in their office in the middle of nowhere Uganda because of us That was awesome But it caught me off guard towards the end of the trip Because they showed me what this did and what this did is this basically Reopened this office this office had sort of crawled to a halt Because they were processing kids that had lost their parents and they were trying to find profiles and sponsors for them Sponsors to pay for their schooling and all that stuff and their network that their computers were so screwed up that they had to like stop and now kids were streaming into their office and Getting food education medical care my work in Uganda had immediate life-changing results right away Now when I got back to my dream job and I sat down at my desk and I looked for the give me immediate fulfilling results button on my computer. I found it to be missing Because in all my career I had never felt anything like that. It was an amazing feeling to save someone's life 10 or 20 or 100 times over and I found it to be a little bit addictive and I started thinking well if I can do this And I'm one person maybe a lot of people could do a lot of stuff and that's where hackers for charity came from And but I thought to myself this can't possibly work. Who's gonna be interested in this? This is hackers and this is like Africa and poor kids but I gave it a shot and one of our first projects that we posted was for AOET and I had this spec'd out. I had this job spec'd out recently what they needed was a sponsorship site like this People online could click on the little picture. You've probably seen stuff like this job specs out at like $50,000 six people six months So Paul Maddoff our first volunteer coded this in like a week like a case of Red Bull or something for free Cranked this out Result 61 children sponsored that means 61 children have somebody in the US paying for their education their medical care Everything for an entire year 61 kids So I had the bug I wrote no tech hacking put this little stamp on the front decided donate all my proceeds to this program and When I said to AOET I want to give you money from my book. Where should it go? They said send the money to Kenya because kids are starving So, let me show I this is I know this is like sort of infomercial ish But let me let me show you this video of our food program My name is Abel Abel Okay, and what grade are you Okay, so you live here alone by yourself I live here alone and your parents your parents your mom your dad I'm sorry, and you built this home you built this No one helped yeah, it's good you did a good job on it, but it has some problems. Yeah The house is too small for the boy He has a table that somebody donated to him has no chair whenever the rains rain This house is actually flooded. You can see on the sides of this wall. It is dumb right now, and it is a dry season When was the last time I rained? Three weeks ago it rained three weeks ago, and it is still three weeks. It is still dumb So you're working Friday Saturday Sunday Sometimes Tuition money if you had someone providing food You could work less Work less yeah And you you told me you want to be a lawyer a judge. Yes. Yeah study law I That's a lot of schooling that you'll be in school for a long time. That's okay. You enjoy school We invited Abel to the hackers for charity food drive and the next day he showed up We provided him with 16 kilograms of maize and a pound of cooking fat We also provided him with seeds and garden space so that he can grow his own vegetables The maize and cooking fat will last a month, but the garden will most likely last for years The culture is extremely reserved, but when we presented him with a t-shirt from Kingpin Enterprises, he was all smiles Abel will be entered into the online AOT sponsorship system Which was designed by hackers for charity volunteer Paul Madoff He'll eventually find a sponsor to a system with his food health care and school fees But until that time comes hackers for charity will continue to stand in the gap for Abel and the other thousands of children We currently support through our food program All right, so this thing is this thing is incredibly cool. It's incredibly powerful but it was off-center just a little bit for me because This wasn't computers and being the computer geek that I am at heart. I still have a passion for technology So I said to that to a OET. I'm like, well, what do you need? I'm like a computer guy and they said training labs We need computer training labs because it's about education. It's about empowerment So we started building them computer labs. Some of them was we use donated equipment Sometimes we would we would take the funds that we rose and we would you know that we raised and we would buy new equipment So here's here's just a quick look at what our classroom program does Ten computers this December program is really a program to All right, so an interesting thing has started to happen though and this thing has started to get really personal Now that I'm living in Uganda. I'm actually meeting some of these people and I want to take a second to introduce you to Fred Now now Fred does not own a computer. He's a Ugandan. What he does is he repairs laptops He figured this out on his own like how to repair laptops and he repairs the laptop so that he can get time using them After he repairs them. That's the deal. All right, and at the end of this interview I asked him about hackers. Check this out. This is pretty interesting I'm praying that I may have access to them Interrupted with this machine so that I think that's my life Whereas I woke up in the morning and start working with the computer if I'm in a room where there is power There's the machine that I don't feel like eating Yeah, up to night late night That's why I like I can do best at night because I have nothing that interrupts me and free I've been here in Gopalka. I guess but if I happen to be one at least in Uganda So part of the idea is I you know these classroom things are great But you know I love the idea of empowerment, you know, I want to I want to collect $200 buy this kid a net book in a case or Red Bull You know what I mean and and I have the capability to make that thing happen when I was in Uganda one of my trips I met the Minister of Energy. He came to meet me. This is the president's right-hand man This is like the vice president of this country came to me and said I want to build some computer classrooms I've given some money to people and they squandered it and it made me look bad Can you build me a computer classroom? I've never had the vice president of this country come to me and ask me for help Let alone a hacker, right? So this thing scaling up really fast. It's going to take time and it's going to take money and it's going to take manpower Well, I got the time thing straightened out because I quit my job to focus on this So the time shouldn't be a problem Living off of support from this community some of the people in this room are paying for my family's existence in Uganda Which I think is pretty amazing money. We have a couple different things going on You've seen the t-shirts for sale that goes to support this work the donor cloud You get a link on our website that goes to support our work and the informer Which I'm going to talk a little bit more about at the end is a subscription service to give you access to cool stuff Industry cool stuff before anybody else does That's what we're trying to do for money and then the manpower is the last thing manpower is us Thank you. Do I have five minutes from now? Excellent. We're good the manpower part of this equation is us. It's this community See we have an amazing community and I am a product of this community the knowledge that I gained From this community from reading the stuff that's out there and interacting with you people at Defconn Made me who I am today Literally, which is why I'm a hacking community advocate At this point and I'm pretty proud of that role because we we just kick complete ass And if you don't believe me when I say that You haven't heard about the PayPal incident See a few weeks ago I sort of screwed up and all of our funds are in are in PayPal and I need to flip to a business account So we could have a fancier shopping cart So I flipped it and I checked the little box that said I'm a 501 c3 Which technically we are because we filed but I don't have the stuff back from the IRS And then as I got into the PayPal process They're like send us the stuff from the IRS and I'm like oops Can I go back and they're like no no your funds are frozen and I'm in Uganda living off that account so I got all pissed off and Like Twittered it. I was like PayPal freaking shut us down six hours later PayPal unlocked us and Started sending emails saying can you tell your people to stop? I'm hearing rumors of phone switches and fax servers exploding And the answer was no I cannot tell my people to stop And for those of you that are into charts I have some charts to prove that our community rocks see this little this little thing shows me shows you how many Children we fed over time the little blips on the the left there are me trying to do this with Informer By Informer subscriptions. Whoo. Okay. Well then in April Things start to improve right well April 22nd simple nomads starts contributing April 30th Rola for leases a Maltigo super license May 9th We get an O day release through Informer May 30th the backtrack team says we're gonna release backtrack for through Informer and look at the numbers The community did this the community fed thousands of children by giving us a little bit of content and you people bought subscriptions and the thing that's cool about this is that these were people from all walks of life all Religions. I'm a Christian. I'm not gonna point them out, but we've got a Jew We've got a Wiccan an atheist on this list and that doesn't matter Because the end result is exactly the same and I don't know about you I think this is cool, but I never in a million years expected this What happened to my sound give me sound? You're welcome. I have to play it again now that we have sound check this out You're welcome. Thank you So thousands of miles away on the other side of the world These are the parents of the kids that were feeding the families that were feet that were feeding saying thank you hackers I think it's the first time ever hackers Hackers been thanked so the magic formula at least for me was first I had passion passion got me so far as getting myself ahead of the game I also had a higher purpose a large part of it for me was spiritual But the higher purpose was looking out for others that were less fortunate It was a higher purpose combined with the power of we the three P's made an explosive combination So my advice through all of this what the advice that I promised you is it's great to have passion But when it gets right down to it make a difference. It doesn't have to be through hackers for charity Just do something that's gonna matter. We have a powerful community Let's leverage it if you do decide to help with hackers for charity Got a bunch of options talked about the t-shirts and the cloud the informer When you leave there are gonna be business cards out at the back door. These are informer cards What you do is you take these cards and you give them to people that you think rock I want this I want to spam all the speakers at this conference that are worth anything Because these cards say your work rocks. It can save lives Go to the informer site and we're gonna make them contributors so that their stuff goes through informer So we can make more money That's what the cards are for and our bulletin board system get online check out our new bulletin board system If you've got computers in Boston go on our BBS and say I've got computers in Boston I want somebody else in Boston to go. I found this little charity over in Boston that needs computers I'm gonna do that thing. It's a way to enable. It's a simple little thing. It's not much to it It's very cool. It's a way to get plugged in so The question that remains is now that you're in Uganda Africa And you've sold everything you've burned bridges. Are you really still a hacker? You know and I guess I am because certain things make me laugh. This is this is part of me So let me show you a few pictures of some things that I've seen in Uganda. I don't know how to explain this one This has something to do with power over ethernet and Viagra I'm guessing This one made me laugh too. This is a lock sold in Uganda the exploit heavy-duty lock It's got bliss written on it exploit his breath is bliss. See if you guys get what made me laugh about this one Front page no security required That's Microsoft product, isn't it? How about this one? The omnipotent power supply And I can't resist the shot like this which I'm still thinking about 2,600 even in Uganda And yes, I still shoulder surf in fact I can't go into a bank without taking pictures of the guy's badge and the little sign that says make sure you lock your Workstation before you get up and pictures of the guard playing with the cell phone and then pictures of the CSO's machine because he didn't lock his screen Shoulder surfing I went to Uganda telecom to order a USB modem and he wouldn't sell it to me until he showed me how to use it You plug it in you hit next 18 million times. I think he read the eula And I said okay, that's great. Can I go he says no I have to show you how to set it up So he put in his username and his password And I said hold on let me film Because I want to remember this when I get home And so I filmed and then when he did the password I turned the camera down Five characters and yes, I could surf the internet for absolutely free This is where the Christian hacker part sucks. I can't That social engineering is still something I do I see these guys working on the phone system Can't resist that so I forget what I said But it was something very witty and social engineering thing and they they let me take pictures and this is their phone system It's all like horizons and the last but not least Dumpster diving I still do it. It's just a little different in Uganda In fact, remember the Walmart and the Target and all those shops I showed you they were all pictures of the same area Just taken from different entrances. This is the paper section you go here for paper Let me just show you the video Bank It's like a drug deal gone bad So we have some of the paper at the booth you'll have to come check it out and last but not least I still have an iPhone It's just the the plan is a little different It's a scratch off and and I can still do Google from it Which is good and it has it has some really addictive applications like the MTN zone which tells you when the traffic is low You get a discount on your cell phone usage. This is a 10% discount Sometimes it goes to 95% And I figured out a little loophole in that when it goes to 95% if you hit the menu button It sticks at 95% until you make your call. So I hacked it and it's very clever Except for the fact that I waited two hours for the 95% and didn't have to call anybody that sort of suck And this last slide which is no this gas station is not connected to the internet So that's it. Yes, I'm still a hacker. Yes, I'm still here the rumors of my demise are greatly exaggerated And don't forget the message make a difference do something when you guys are leaving make sure you get those cards Spam those speakers and I'm gonna have a video up here This is the latest and former release roll-off has released a Firefox plugin for multigo Which does some incredibly sexy stuff and informer subscribers get it first. You don't need to hear it. It's all written up here I'm gonna play it while you guys take off. So thank you very much