My career change. From Mr Fix it IT GUY to HACKER

May 5th 2016 I was let go from my position at Koch Industries. OOooooo it hurt. I loved that job and I believe I was pretty damn good at it. I was basically the end all be all IT guy for 2 Chemical plants in the Midwest (United States) Computers, switchers, routers, WAPs, servers, phones, security cameras... Yooooouuuu naaaaaaaaammmmeeeee it! I took care of it. Then my job changed. They didn't want me working on those things anymore. They wanted me to be more of a Project Manager. Which would have been fine but... my plants were good. We were cutting back on spending and we had just got done upgrading a lot of our infrastructure... Safe to say I spent most of my time twiddling my thumbs in my office.......... and then I was FIRED

I never been fired before but I saw it a mile away. So much so that while I was twiddling my thumbs. I got interested in a new field. Cyber Security. I had a friend on Xbox tell me that he was a malware analyst and got paid $125K... State side... WTF!?!!? I was a contractor in Afghanistan and made about $150K for a year but being away from family was not worth it. I started looking this stuff up and saw something I never heard of before.... "Ethical Hacking"...."Sounds like a play on words.. Hackers are bad people" I thought.. Some yes are very bad people but there is another side of the coin.. the good guys.. Imagine owning a bank... why not hire someone to try and rob it and tell you the weaknesses they found so you can fix it before someone bad can take advantage of those same weaknesses?

So at work I studied every tutorial I could find. Every video , forum, online course,etc. I taught myself to be a hacker. SO much that when I took the actual CEH course I was so far ahead half the time I didn't pay attention. But there is knowing how to do something and knowing the "TEST" way of doing something. Gotta answer those questions and get that piece of paper that says "I KNOW THIS". In March I got My Top Secret Clearance from the good ol US GOV..

Now the hard part passing these test.. I have one this month (Security+) and next month (CEH) but the BIG ONE.. THE BIG BITCH is the OSCP. I want to get that before Nov. I love the field of Cyber Security. It's fun, it's challenging, it's always changing, and ITS JOB SECURITY AT ITS FINEST..... oh and the pay. Currently I do little odd jobs for small companies (testing networks and building them) but one day I hope to work for a company like Cylance or the NSA (Hell yea SPY ON ALL YOU F*CKERS... Joke joke).

I now look back on that date of May 5th 2016 as the day I was kinda forced to make the greatest change of my life...