intrusive thoughts are fun

everyone standing on a train platform has, at least once, felt the tiny gremlin whisper "what if you just. stepped off." (or pushed somebody else, 100% valid) the french call it l'appel du vide, the call of the void. it's normal. it's SO normal it's basically the factory default on the human brain. the difference is that your gremlin is bluffing, and mine ships with root.

the void, but for people who can actually do the thing

here's the thing nobody tells you about intrusive thoughts: they're load-bearing. they're the brain running a threat sim in the background, going "hey what if we did the insane thing", precisely SO THAT you get to say no. jerk the wheel. jump the barrier. push the guy. you don't want to. the thought is just the muscle that says you won't.

cute. wholesome, even. right up until your intrusive thoughts aren't so intrusive anymore, and they feel like the thing you could do and get away with it :)

because when i'm standing on the platform, the gremlin doesn't say "what if you jumped." it says "you have the knowledge, you know exactly how to get a shit ton of data, sell it, win big." and the horrible, but kinda funny part is: it's RIGHT. i could. and many of the people reading this too could, in fact, get the data and sell it.

i have seen the terabytes

i'm not talking gigs. gigs is a rounding error. i have stood in front of exposed buckets, misconfigured shares, open indices, whole databases sitting on the public internet with the metaphorical door not just unlocked but REMOVED and leaned against the wall, and the number that makes sense there is terabytes. plural, and in the fucking worst way possible.

and every single time, the void does its little pitch. keep it. sell it. you found it, finders keepers, the market for this is RIGHT THERE (you even kinda know the buyers) and it pays in numbers with too many zeroes. one little cp -r and you never think about money again.

why the wheel stays straight

and every single time i close the tab and email the CERT :)

not because i'm a saint. saints are boring and they don't find open S3 buckets. i do it because keeping my hands clean is the whole flex. any script kiddie can take the money. and taking it is EASY, the fortune sits one cp -r away, thats the whole trap. staying broke on purpose on top of that is kinda ass, and i do it anyway.

42 jurisdictions and an embarrassing number of hosting abuse teams have gotten a very polite, perhaps a bit of cock in my fingertips type of email from me that ruined their afternoon and probably saved someone's identity, medical history, or life savings. i mean who knows right. i certainly dont.

the reason "a little bit" is never a little bit is that on the other end of every one of those terabytes is a person who did nothing to you. a name, an address, a diagnosis, a kid. the capability is real and the temptation is real and pretending otherwise is how people talk themselves into becoming the thing they were supposed to stop. the thought is fine. everyone gets the thought.

everyone talks about it!! right?!?!

right? everyone talks about how cyber kinda fucks with your head. how stressed you feel!!! have you felt it too? but nobody talks about what we do. about using our skillz for something a little bit less ethical than the usual work. buncha people think they know the feeling, but you and i? we know they really, really, really don't.

we dont really talk about it

and i wonder why. so much people have publicly said and stated!!! how BAD! they feel while working in cyber. like ok dude, you had a bunch of alerts on your screen. we on the offensive side have had millions of records of personal information, PHI, bank shit. and we're broke!!! we kinda uhhhh need the money??

the WORK was never the problem. give me the mountain. 200 hosts, a deadline that passed last week, an interpreter that segfaults if you breathe near it. fine. genuinely fine. i'm GOOD at workload, workload i can carry forever.

what i can't seem to do is say ANY of this out loud. not once. not to a therapist, not to a friend, and here's the insane bit, not even to my own people. i have sat in rooms full of offsec folks. MY people. the exact humans who have felt this identical pull in their own fingertips. and we talked about tooling and CVEs and whose burp license expired. and not one of us said the thing. a whole room holding the same secret, everybody pretending the heavy part of the job is the hours.

it isn't the hours!!! it's holding a terabyte of somebody's whole life in one hand and a price in the other and deciding, by yourself, on a random tuesday, with nobody to phone about it, no. and then telling literally no one you did. thats the weight. thats the one nobody puts in the burnout thinkpiece, because we never said it existed.

and you wanna know the REAL reason we bury it? because the second it leaves your mouth you stop being the professional and you start being the threat. it doesnt even feel like a thought you had. it feels dirty, like the whisper alone already convicted you, like the gremlin opening its mouth means you were halfway out the door with the drive already.

how can you even THINK of doing such a thing?? we trust you precisely because stuff like that would NEVER cross your mind.

so you swallow it and you say nothing and you carry the little bit of dirty around all day.

but read the top of this thing again. the whisper is the FEATURE. the thought is the exact muscle that flexes so you dont move. the person you should actually be scared of isnt me, the one who thought about the cp -r and felt sick about it. its whoever never thinks about it at all, cause they never installed the brake. i thought about it every time. every time, i didnt. and somehow THAT is the part im not allowed to say out loud.

and its not that i dont have people. i do, i love a few of them a stupid amount. it's that not one of them can actually get here, because they've never had to stand where i stood and pick. you can be surrounded by people who love you and still be the only one in the room who's seen the thing. this just wasnt the part i wanted to be alone for.

nobody was ever gonna bring it up. so i guess this is me bringing it up. lol. its pretty heavy over here.

cause everybody's a fucking pro, and they all got answers for trouble they know