HObies + Interests

• This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends
  By: Nicole Perlroth
  

  About

  Bloomsbury presents This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends by Nicole Perlroth, read by Allyson Ryan.
  
  Zero day: a software bug that allows a hacker to break into your devices and move around undetected. One of the most coveted tools in a spy's arsenal, a zero day has the power to silently spy on your iPhone, dismantle the safety controls at a chemical plant, alter an election and shut down the electric grid (just ask Ukraine).
  
  For decades, under cover of classification levels and non-disclosure agreements, the United States government became the world’s dominant hoarder of zero days. US government agents paid top dollar - first thousands and later millions of dollars - to hackers willing to sell their lock-picking code and their silence.
  
  Then the United States lost control of its hoard and the market.
  
  Now those zero days are in the hands of hostile nations and mercenaries who do not care if your vote goes missing, your clean water is contaminated or our nuclear plants melt down.
  
  Filled with spies, hackers, arms dealers and a few unsung heroes, written like a thriller and a reference, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends is an astonishing feat of journalism. Based on years of reporting and hundreds of interviews, The New York Times reporter Nicole Perlroth lifts the curtain on a market in shadow, revealing the urgent threat faced by us all if we cannot bring the global cyber arms race to heel.
  

• Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency
  By: Andy Greenberg

  About

  Over the last decade, a single innovation has massively fueled digital black markets: cryptocurrency. Crime lords inhabiting lawless corners of the internet have operated more freely—whether in drug dealing, money laundering, or human trafficking—than their analog counterparts could have ever dreamed of. By transacting not in dollars or pounds but in currencies with anonymous ledgers, overseen by no government, beholden to no bankers, these black marketeers have sought to rob law enforcement of their chief method of cracking down on illicit finance: following the money.
  
  But what if the centerpiece of this dark economy held a secret, fatal flaw? What if their currency wasn’t so cryptic after all? An investigator using the right mixture of technical wizardry, financial forensics, and old-fashioned persistence could uncover an entire world of wrongdoing.
  
  Tracers in the Dark is a story of crime and pursuit unlike any other. With unprecedented access to the major players in federal law enforcement and private industry, veteran cybersecurity reporter Andy Greenberg tells an astonishing saga of criminal empires built and destroyed. He introduces an IRS agent with a defiant streak, a Bitcoin-tracing Danish entrepreneur, and a colorful ensemble of hardboiled agents and prosecutors as they delve deep into the crypto-underworld. The result is a thrilling, globe-spanning story of dirty cops, drug bazaars, trafficking rings, and the biggest takedown of an online narcotics market in the history of the Internet.
  
  Utterly of our time, Tracers in the Dark is a cat-and-mouse story and a tale of a technological one-upmanship. Filled with canny maneuvering and shocking twists, it answers a provocative question: How would some of the world’s most brazen criminals behave if they were sure they could never get caught?
  
  

• American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road
  By: Nick Bilton
  

  About

  In 2011, a twenty-six-year-old libertarian programmer named Ross Ulbricht launched the ultimate free market: the Silk Road, a clandestine Web site hosted on the Dark Web where anyone could trade anything—drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, poisons—free of the government’s watchful eye.
  
  It wasn’t long before the media got wind of the new Web site where anyone—not just teenagers and weed dealers but terrorists and black hat hackers—could buy and sell contraband detection-free. Spurred by a public outcry, the federal government launched an epic two-year manhunt for the site’s elusive proprietor, with no leads, no witnesses, and no clear jurisdiction. All the investigators knew was that whoever was running the site called himself the Dread Pirate Roberts.
  
  The Silk Road quickly ballooned into $1.2 billion enterprise, and Ross embraced his new role as kingpin. He enlisted a loyal crew of allies in high and low places, all as addicted to the danger and thrill of running an illegal marketplace as their customers were to the heroin they sold. Through his network he got wind of the target on his back and took drastic steps to protect himself—including ordering a hit on a former employee. As Ross made plans to disappear forever, the Feds raced against the clock to catch a man they weren’t sure even existed, searching for a needle in the haystack of the global Internet.
  
  Drawing on exclusive access to key players and two billion digital words and images Ross left behind, Vanity Fair correspondent and New York Times bestselling author Nick Bilton offers a tale filled with twists and turns, lucky breaks and unbelievable close calls. It’s a story of the boy next door’s ambition gone criminal, spurred on by the clash between the new world of libertarian-leaning, anonymous, decentralized Web advocates and the old world of government control, order, and the rule of law. Filled with unforgettable characters and capped by an astonishing climax, American Kingpin might be dismissed as too outrageous for fiction. But it’s all too real.
  

• Darknet Diaries
  Podcast
  

  About

  Explore the dark side of the Internet with host Jack Rhysider as he takes you on a journey
  through the chilling world of privacy hacks, data breaches, and cyber crime. The
  masterful criminal hackers who dwell on the dark side show us just how vulnerable we all
  are.
  

  Recommended Episodes

  • Episode 21: Black Duck Eggs

    Ira Winkler’s specialty is assembling elite teams of special forces and intelligence officers to go after companies. Ira shares a story about a time he and his team broke into a global 5 company. A company so large that theft of intellictual property could result in billions of dollars of damage. Listen

  • Episode 29: Stuxnet

    Stuxnet was the most sophisticated virus ever discovered. Its target was a nuclear enrichment facility in Iran. This virus was successfully able to destroy numerous centrifuges. Hear who did it and why. Listen

  • Episode 53: Shadow Brokers

    The NSA has some pretty advanced, super secret, hacking tools. What if these secret hacking tools were to end up in the wrong person’s hands? Well, that happened. Listen

  • Episode 54: NOTPETYA

    This is the story of NotPetya. Which seems to be the first time we’ve seen what a cyber war looks like. In the summer of 2017 Ukraine suffered a serious and catastrophic cyber attack on their whole country. Hear how it went down, what got hit, and who was responsible. Listen

  • Episode 57: MS08-067

    Hear what goes on internally when Microsoft discovers a major vulnerability within Windows. Listen

  • Episode 73: WANNACRY

    In May 2017 the world fell victim to a major ransomware attack known as WannaCry. One of the victims was UK’s national health service. Security researchers scrambled to try to figure out how to stop it and who was behind it. Listen

  • Episode 86: The LinkedIn Incident

    In 2012, LinkedIn was the target of a data breach. A hacker got in and stole millions of user details. Username and password hashes were then sold to people willing to buy. This episode goes over the story of what happened. Listen

  • Episode 94: Mariposa BOTNET

    Chris Davis has been stopping IT security threats for decades. He’s currently running the company Hyas that he started. In this episode he tells a few tales of some threats that he helped stop.
  • Listen

    Episode 98: Zero Day Brokers

    Zero day brokers are people who make or sell malware that’s sold to people who will use that malware to exploit people. It’s a strange and mysterious world that not many people know a lot about. Nicole Perlroth, who is a cybersecurity reporter for the NY Times, dove in head first which resulted in her writing a whole book on it. Listen

  • Episode 100: NSO

    The NSO Group creates a spyware called Pegasus which gives someone access to the data on a mobile phone. They sell this spyware to government agencies around the world. How is it used and what kind of company is the NSO Group? Listen

  • Episode 100: NSO

    The NSO Group creates a spyware called Pegasus which gives someone access to the data on a mobile phone. They sell this spyware to government agencies around the world. How is it used and what kind of company is the NSO Group? Listen

  • Episode 111: ZEUS

    ZeuS is a banking trojan. Designed to steal money from online bank user’s accounts. This trojan became so big, that it resulted in one of the biggest FBI operations ever. Listen

  • Episode 112: Dirty Coms

    This episode we talk with a guy named “Drew” who gives us a rare peek into what some of the young hackers are up to today. From listening to Drew, we can see that times are changing for the motive behind hacking. In the ’90s and ’00s it was done for fun and curiosity. In the ’10s Anonymous showed us what Hacktivism is. And now, in the ’20s, the young hackers seem to be profit driven. Listen

  • Episode 126: REVIL

    REvil is the name of a ransomware service as well as a group of criminals inflicting ransomware onto the world. Hear how this ransomware shook the world. Listen

  • Episode 130: Jason’s Pen Test

    Join us as we sit down with Jason Haddix, a renowned penetration tester who has made a name for himself by uncovering vulnerabilities in some of the world’s biggest companies. In this episode, Jason shares his funny and enlightening stories about breaking into buildings and computers, and talks about the time he discovered a major security flaw in a popular mobile banking app. Listen

  • Episode 135: The D.R. Incident

    Omar Avilez worked in the CSIRT of the Dominican Republic when a major cyber security incident erupted. Omar walks us through what happened and the incident response procedures that he went through. Listen

  • Episode 137: PREDATOR

    A new type of mercenary spyware came on the radar called Predator. It’ll infect a mobile phone, and then suck up all the data from it. Contacts, text messages, location, and more. This malware is being sold to intelligence agencies around the world. Listen

• Permanent Record
  By: Edward Snowden

  About

  Edward Snowden, the man who risked everything to expose the US government’s system of mass surveillance, reveals for the first time the story of his life, including how he helped to build that system and what motivated him to try to bring it down.
  
  In 2013, twenty-nine-year-old Edward Snowden shocked the world when he broke with the American intelligence establishment and revealed that the United States government was secretly pursuing the means to collect every single phone call, text message, and email. The result would be an unprecedented system of mass surveillance with the ability to pry into the private lives of every person on earth. Six years later, Snowden reveals for the very first time how he helped to build this system and why he was moved to expose it.
  
  Spanning the bucolic Beltway suburbs of his childhood and the clandestine CIA and NSA postings of his adulthood, Permanent Record is the extraordinary account of a bright young man who grew up online—a man who became a spy, a whistleblower, and, in exile, the Internet’s conscience. Written with wit, grace, passion, and an unflinching candor, Permanent Record is a crucial memoir of our digital age and destined to be a classic.
  

• The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World
  By: Brad Stone
  

  About

  Ten years ago, the idea of getting into a stranger’s car, or walking into a stranger’s home, would have seemed bizarre and dangerous, but today it’s as common as ordering a book online. Uber and Airbnb are household names: redefining neighbourhoods, challenging the way governments regulate business and changing the way we travel.
  
  In the spirit of iconic Silicon Valley renegades like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, a new generation of entrepreneurs is sparking yet another cultural upheaval through technology. They are among the Upstarts, idiosyncratic founders with limitless drive and an abundance of self-confidence. Young, hungry and brilliant, they are rewriting the traditional rules of business, changing our day-to-day lives and often sidestepping serious ethical and legal obstacles in the process.
  
  The Upstarts is the definitive account of a dawning age of tenacity, creativity, conflict and wealth. In Brad Stone’s highly anticipated and riveting account of the most radical companies of the new Silicon Valley, we find out how it all started, and how the world is wildly different than it was ten years ago.
  

• Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers
  By: Andy Greenberg
  

  About

  In 2014, the world witnessed the start of a mysterious series of cyberattacks. Targeting American utility companies, NATO, and electric grids in Eastern Europe, the strikes grew ever more brazen. They culminated in the summer of 2017, when the malware known as NotPetya was unleashed, penetrating, disrupting, and paralyzing some of the world’s largest businesses—from drug manufacturers to software developers to shipping companies. At the attack’s epicenter in Ukraine, ATMs froze. The railway and postal systems shut down. Hospitals went dark. NotPetya spread around the world, inflicting an unprecedented ten billion dollars in damage—the largest, most destructive cyberattack the world had ever seen.
  
  The hackers behind these attacks are quickly gaining a reputation as the most dangerous team of cyberwarriors in history: a group known as Sandworm. Working in the service of Russia’s military intelligence agency, they represent a persistent, highly skilled force, one whose talents are matched by their willingness to launch broad, unrestrained attacks on the most critical infrastructure of their adversaries. They target government and private sector, military and civilians alike.
  
  A chilling, globe-spanning detective story, Sandworm considers the danger this force poses to our national security and stability. As the Kremlin’s role in foreign government manipulation comes into greater focus, Sandworm exposes the realities not just of Russia’s global digital offensive, but of an era where warfare ceases to be waged on the battlefield. It reveals how the lines between digital and physical conflict, between wartime and peacetime, have begun to blur—with world-shaking implications.
  
  

• The Design of Everyday Things
  By: Don Norman
  

  About

  The ultimate guide to human-centered design Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure out which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door. The fault, argues this ingenious -- even liberating -- book, lies not in ourselves, but in product design that ignores the needs of users and the principles of cognitive psychology. The problems range from ambiguous and hidden controls to arbitrary relationships between controls and functions, coupled with a lack of feedback or other assistance and unreasonable demands on memorization. The Design of Everyday Things shows that good, usable design is possible. The rules are make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and make intelligent use of constraints. The guide the user effortlessly to the right action on the right control at the right time. The Design of Everyday Things is a powerful primer on how -- and why -- some products satisfy customers while others only frustrate them.
  

• Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet
  By: Claire L. Evans
  

  About

  Women are not ancillary to the history of technology; they turn up at the very beginning of every important wave. But they've often been hidden in plain sight, their inventions and contributions touching our lives in ways we don't even realize.
  
  Author Claire L. Evans finally gives these unsung female heroes their due with her social history of the Broad Band, the women who made the internet what it is today. Learn from Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, who wove numbers into the first program for a mechanical computer in 1842. Seek inspiration from Grace Hopper, the tenacious mathematician who democratized computing by leading the charge for machine-independent programming languages after World War II. Meet Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler, the one-woman Google who kept the earliest version of the Internet online, and Stacy Horn, who ran one of the first-ever social networks on a shoestring out of her New York City apartment in the 1980s. Evans shows us how these women built and colored the technologies we can't imagine life without.
  
  Join the ranks of the pioneers who defied social convention and the longest odds to become database poets, information-wranglers, hypertext dreamers, and glass ceiling-shattering dot com-era entrepreneurs.
  

• Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save The World
  By: Joseph Menn
  

  About

  The shocking untold story of the elite secret society of hackers fighting to protect our privacy, our freedom -- even democracy itself
  
  Cult of the Dead Cow is the tale of the oldest, most respected, and most famous American hacking group of all time. Though until now it has remained mostly anonymous, its members invented the concept of hacktivism, released the top tool for testing password security, and created what was for years the best technique for controlling computers from afar, forcing giant companies to work harder to protect customers. They contributed to the development of Tor, the most important privacy tool on the net, and helped build cyberweapons that advanced US security without injuring anyone. With its origins in the earliest days of the Internet, the cDc is full of oddball characters -- activists, artists, even future politicians. Many of these hackers have become top executives and advisors walking the corridors of power in Washington and Silicon Valley. The most famous is former Texas Congressman and current presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke, whose time in the cDc set him up to found a tech business, launch an alternative publication in El Paso, and make long-shot bets on unconventional campaigns.
  Today, the group and its followers are battling electoral misinformation, making personal data safer, and battling to keep technology a force for good instead of for surveillance and oppression. Cult of the Dead Cow shows how governments, corporations, and criminals came to hold immense power over individuals and how we can fight back against them.
  

• Steve Jobs
  By: Walter Isaacson
  

  About

  Walter Isaacson's worldwide bestselling biography of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. Based on more than forty interviews with Steve Jobs conducted over two years--as well as interviews with more than 100 family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues--Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. Isaacson's portrait touched millions of readers. At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. Although Jobs cooperated with the author, he asked for no control over what was written. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. He himself spoke candidly about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues offer an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted. His tale is instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values. Steve Jobs is the inspiration for the movie of the same name starring Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, and Jeff Daniels, directed by Danny Boyle with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin.
  

• Hacked
  Podcast

  Strange tales of hacking, tech, internet grifters, Al, and security with Jordan & Scott. Are
  internet hitmen really a thing? What does someone do with a crypto wallet full of millions
  and a lost password? Did a Minecraft scammer really hack the president? Hacked is a
  technology show about people hacking things together and apart, with your old pals
  Jordan Bloemen and Scott Francis Winder.
  Check Out Here

• Cyber Security Headlines
  Podcast

  Daily stories from the world of information security. To delve into any daily story, head to
  CISOseries.com.
  Check Out Here

Outside of building and designing this website, I have a wide range of design-related interests. This includes exploring different typefaces, photography, freelancing for branding projects, personal art endeavors, and more. Art and design have been a core passion of mine for as long as I can remember and were the primary way in which I first engaged with technology.

Favorite Tools 

Affinity Designer Source Windows / MacOS
iPad

Affinity Designer 2 is a professional-grade graphic design software that allows users to create high-quality vector graphics, illustrations, and designs. This powerful tool includes advanced features such as unlimited undo history, advanced typography controls, and seamless integration with other Affinity products. What makes it stand out is its intuitive interface, making it accessible to both beginners and experienced designers. Common use cases include creating logos, icons, graphics, and illustrations for various industries including publishing, advertising, and web development.

Source

Affinity Photo Windows / MacOS
iPad

Affinity Photo is a professional-grade photo editing software that allows users to edit, retouch, and enhance their images, but does not require a subscription just like Affinity Designer. This powerful tool provides a wide range of advanced features, such as layers, masks, and effects, which allow for precise control over image manipulation. Unique features include support for HDR and 16-bit images, as well as advanced selection tools. Designed for photographers, graphic designers, and artists, Affinity Photo 2 is perfect for editing and retouching photographs, creating digital art, and preparing images for print or web publication.

Blocs 5 MacOS
iPad
Source

Blocs 5 is a powerful website creation software that allows users to create and manage their own websites without the need for extensive coding knowledge. Its standout feature is its visual interface, which enables the ability to design and customize a website’s layout, content, and functionality using a drag-and-drop system. Blocs 5 is also the tool I used to build this website!

Procreate iPad Source

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.

Source

Image2Icon MacOS

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.