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1989? The first thing I remember seriously disassembling was the Stoned
Virus, and from there, it could only get better. I started collecting
viruses, writing my own, reading all the Virus Report by Bonsembiante (a
printed zine), and competing with him on publishing analysis and commented
disassemblies of viruses (though he probably never knew it). At some point
before that I got my first paid programming job, writing a Turbo Pascal app
that had to print a map of the streets marking the water sprouts, in 40
seconds from the moment a fireman picked up the phone, map digitalization
software included. I used predictive typing for the addresses and lots of
low-level tricks to speed up dot matrix printing: success, 40s! Though, I
think it was only sold once.
The school had some protections so students couldn’t change the file
systems (an INT 13 hook), with Futo we wrote a boot sector “virus” that
saved the original pointer and allowed us to restore it, everybody knew
about it, it was a really friendly atmosphere and they just let us do what
we wanted. That helped a lot.
In 1993, my final year of secondary school, I joined a university team
focused on viruses (GISVI). The following year, I published and presented my
first paper on writing metamorphic viruses: "RICE - Individualized
Regeneration of Encrypting Code", surprisingly still available online. It
was there I met Beto, long-time maintainer of Impacket and a lifelong
friend. Ever since, he has been my professional cornerstone in security,
somebody I’d keep working with until my last day if I could.
Soon after that I met the HBO team (Hacked by Owls), via Saltamontes, a
great friend, who also was one of my bosses at the Firemen mapping company.
Saltamontes, LBD, OPii, Janx Spirits, amazing people, together with Futo,
all founders of Core SDI/Security. But just before that, a team of 26+
hackers got hired by the Argentinean IRS, a few virus writers, some exploit
writers, system hackers, crypto experts, all in the range 17-19, they (the
IRS) didn’t even know how to legally pay us. They threw us in a large empty
cellar, and just let us loose, until they needed us for something. We
hacked, and coded, and did ftp-mail, and tried Igdrasil Linux as it was
released... It was the genesis of many great things, including Core. Oh, I’m
getting a bit tired of writing, sorry :-/
Ah! Yes! At some point, “somebody dropped a pay phone in a friend's
backyard”, and the friend, thinking it was an alien device, called us. The
only thing we could think of was to open it and reverse engineer it all the
way, producing software updates and improvements that eventually escaped the
laboratory the day we left the window open. These updates nested in a
payphone outside a hacking conference in Buenos Aires in 1994 to show a
“Manifiesto HBO” in the LCD display of the phone, picked up by local
newspapers. No wait, “the aliens dropped” two [Telecom] payphones, with a
note to deliver one to M. Blaze at HOPE’95 in NYC so he could break the
clipper chip with an alien tool, though he never needed it because he had
his brain to do it. The weirdest part is that the aliens asked us to deliver
a “Telefónica” payphone, which we didn’t have. Afraid of getting struck by
lasers from outer space, we were forced to get into a
drug-dealers-hostage-exchange situation dark at night to exchange the extra
Telecom phone for a Telefonica phone, which was a lot heavier too. So, with
a phone in the backpack, and a hundred excuses that we never needed, we
first went to Summercon in Atlanta to play “spot the FBI agent”, and then
arrived at NYC for HOPE. Luckily nobody bombed the airplane on our way in
(from Argentina), possibly because somebody unknown (unknown but with a
good Spirit) stuck a “BOMB!” (“Boom?”) note in the restroom, and what are
the chances that there are two bombs in a single airplane? As expected, the
police and dogs sniffing around the airplane didn’t understand it was all
for the safety of the fellow passengers.
And then, Core happened. Lots of magic in the ~15 years at Core. We
“invented” Contextual Access, Zero Trust, SIEM and named it Core Force, a
product that was just too large for us, though we sold it and deployed it
into a large bank, and other places, to then release it open source in 1997.
We did consulting (“Red Teaming” today) for very large companies,
[anonymously] participated in the definition of PCI standard (sorry), broke
things, fixed things, and had infinite fun, growing the team with more
amazing people. We sold $30k of exploits to Kurtz and McClure, who never
paid us (don’t worry, it’s prescribed now) for their pentesting team. We
were close pals to Secure Networks Incorporated, worked on developing
Ballista, then other security products as it was sold to Network Associates.
And then, also sort of derived from interactions with the team at SNI
(Oliver and Alfred mostly?), we started Core IMPACT, a professional
pen-testing tool (a collection of QAed exploits, with a great UI), and
printed the memorable t-shirts “Go Hack Yourself!" (~2001). Core and the
conferences were my travel agency, and I loved it. I got connected to my
idols that turned out to be just people (some of them at least). And then,
I left Core :-p
Just one anecdote: When we hired Raddy (still going around in the
community as L. Lavarello), he came to the interview with the school uniform
and his mother... Inside the office (downtown Buenos Aires, lawyers office
building) we were playing soccer, the people downstairs knocked at our door
to ask that we stop doing noise, and we opened it shirtless, sweating, with
the ball under the arm, and a serious face to say “sure, don’t worry”...
and Raddy’s mother asking us “please, take care of my son”.
For him I originally wrote the ABOs, one by one as he solved them, or
had a new idea. Then most in the office were playing, and it made sense to
make them public. I also remember abo5.c was particularly challenging for
many, and one day riq came with a solution he dreamed of: A gorgeous lady
came out of the water and told him the solution, something like “overwrite
the pointer...". The next day he showed up with a solution that was not what
I thought, but worked, so I had to rename it into abo6.c, and add a new
abo5.c before it :-p
Then came the second generation of exploit writers, with ricnar leading
the pack. I always remember his job interview. It was 2006, and somebody