The Gouki behind the keyboard

Personal Homepage

I was born in Portugal and unfortunately, that’s where I currently live. Lisbon, to be accurate. (I hate it!)

I’m a hacker. Actually, a ‘computer hacker’. I will not get into the whole ‘media hacker’ thing, but I would like to say that ‘hacker’ has nothing to do with defacements, DoS’s, stealing WiFi or any other garbage the media has came up with.

Nowadays ‘hacker’ imbibes criminal connotations and this is so well accepted by the population that it has become an impossible task to change it’s meaning.

Quoting Rain Forest Puppy, “No one can unbrainwash the world into reclaiming the original meaning of the term hacker.”

Gouki’s Interests

I’m interested in Linux system administration. More specific, Debian GNU/Linux administration.

I have always been interested in Information Technology, and in the last years I have discovered a big passion for some fields of Information Security.

With my newly discovered passion I felt the need to evolve on a different area. My choice of Operating System.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved my old one, but like I said, evolve. It’s a whole new world out there, and I don’t recommend sticking to a single piece of software while there are dozens of alternatives. Even if it’s just for trying it out, but do it.

I have been a Microsoft* Windows* user for quite some time and I respect *most* of Microsoft’s ideas and methods, however, Windows becomes limited after time. By this, I do *not* mean any of that ‘Windows $ucks’, ‘Windoze’, etc, crap you see with the 31337 community.

On my ol’day’s of Windows* I was a Super Moderator on one of the biggest Microsoft* software boards, unfortunately, problems with the administrator made me quit.

What flavor would you like, sir?

My personal choice is Debian GNU/Linux. I have also been using an old, but more recently very well reviewed distribution, Ubuntu – (a Debian child-distro).

What can you expect from me, at Darknet?

Well, I try to be up-to-date with the most recent news, discoveries, vulnerabilities and pretty much all related to Linux, IT, IS and 24 (my biggest passion of all time).
So, I will try to keep you updated with what is worth it.

I do know that posting news becomes boring after some time, so I’ll try and provide original and exclusive material to all you Darknet readers out there.

“Gouki, I want to offer you beer and Doritos!”

Information on how to get in touch with me can be found on the contact page of my site.

Bottom line, if it exists, I’ve probably played with it. My main expertise lies in Microsoft web and database technologies, namely ASP, anything .net, mssql(From 6.5 up to 2005) and associated web technologies. I spend 80% of my time on an intranet, the other 20% on our outward facing sites, and the other 20% my boss imagines I have, working on private projects. In my spare time I play some mmorpgs, spend time with my wife, work on some websites(Except my own), and I’m currently building a huge crossbows and catapults set for fun and the possible destruction of my flat.

So, any way, who the hell am I? I have known Shaolin for years, he might have some idea how many, I am on that old darknet site he mentioned, but do me and favour, and don’t look there, please? I look terrible and I’m ashamed

Like Shaolin I to started with the whole computer thing when I was little. The order is a little haszy, but I am fairly sure I had the TI 994A before the little old specy. Though my use of them was a little differant. True, I did for a while spend many hours typeing code to find out later it didn’t work…. but before long I was coding my own stuff. In basic on the TI, and z80 assembler on the specy, pascal and modual 2 to on the Amstrad CPC, 6800 assembler and C on the ST….

TI, Spectrum, Comador, Atari ST, 386 and beyond, I have always live with a computer, though shockingly never games. My first consol was a ps2 and that is only 4 years old.

After many years of bedroom activites I definatly should be ashamed of (all with a keyboard – and check this? no net connection) I emerged in the bright old world, a whole host of dead technology and languages no one has used since the romans under my belt, and windows gaining popularity.

Fast forward, past VB, pal, and various noddy little things and I’m in to Delphi, oh my, was I in to Delphi. For 7 years I lived, breathed and probably bathed in the windows API and OOP. Gone was Delphi’s native event handlers, to slow, give me the raw message cue…. mutli threaded servers, no problem, n-tier CORBA clients… you name it, I did it.

Then I got bored.

But thats ok, no one wants desk top or server applications any more. So, a bit late to the party I had a go at ASP, and damn that stuffs ugly. PHP how ever, now thats the nuts, and thus I entered web development.

Some one once said I’d never be a web developer, but my first ever professional site went live to 2.5 million unique IPs in the first 48 hours, truely one of my proudest hours.

I’ve been doing PHP ever since, MySQL for most part but if its SQL, its all the same. Date in and data out, its all fairly much simple. Introduce some AJAX just to spice it up a bit, and we’re all having fun.

Where I am going from here, nobody knows, but I code, there for I am so what ever happens, what ever changes… I am a programmer

Then
I started out with a Spectrum ZX-81 back in the olden days, typing whole games out of the Spectrum magazines I picked up from charity shops.

Yah it had no tape drive, no disk drive, no hard drive..nothing. Once you powered it off, you lost everything. I missed the ugly white ZX-80 just by a few months.

It was a powerful beast.

• Z80A Microprocessor clocked at 3.25MHz.
• 1K RAM, expandable to 16K, 32K or 56K.
• 8K ROM containing BASIC.
• A single ULA for all I/O functions.

After that I quickly upgraded to a Spectrum 48K +, which was a little better and had an external tape deck.

This was where I learnt the basics of computers and programming..my friends had a mixture of things Commodore 64’s and Amigas for the rich kids with the odd Atari here and there.

After that was a Spectrum 128k + with an integrated tape drive.

Back in those days pirating games consisted of a hi-fi with tape-tape capability and a blank tape (plus half an hour of listening to some weird screechin noises).

At secondary school I learnt a bit more with some BBC Basic and a little DR-DOS on the RM Nimbus’s, I remember the beast of the school was a 486-DX66 with a 40mb hard drive or something like that.

I used to hack the network back then to try and play games like PGA Golf, Budokan and Lesuire Suit Larry!

After that I couldn’t afford a PC at home, so I went onto consoles, as that was all I could afford at the time (NES, SNES then PSX).

I kind of drifted away from computers until I had finished college and got back into them during my failed first year of a Electrical and Electronics Degree, I quickly shifted to Software Engineering..during my first year I got all my downloaded warez deleted because I had shared NetBIOS over TCP/IP so some random NBT scanner on the internet had deleted all my stuff.

After that I started learning about networking, security, file permissions and it went on from there.

A year or so later I founded Darknet with another friend on IRC network DALnet and around 1998 I setup this domain.

You can see the old page as it was 5 years ago HERE. There are no earlier versions (thankfully). Yah I know it doesn’t work in Firefox, embarassing eh?

Now it’s about 8 years later, and I know a fair bit about computer security.

Now.
I am now working in information security, my main role being a lead of the attack and penetration team. I also do various other things such as disaster recovery, digital forensics, security audits in compliance with various standards (including BS7799), on the side I do web design (like this site) and various other hobby sites.

My main job though is penetration testing/vulnerability assessment and keeping up with all the latest technologies. I am especially good in information gathering (what the media has labelled as Google Hacking).

After that my strongest suite is the network stack, I’m good down to the packet/header level, not so great at programming, but I can script do PERL/PHP/Bash etc.

I got a lot of experience doing system administation jobs and self-studying in a lab at home, also learnt a lot about Linux in a previous job doing a transition from Windows servers to Linux servers, all from my recommendations.

In my spare time I write about security, I read books, I hack PHP, I enjoy food and the countryside.

I have a few industry certifications, but I don’t really place much emphasis on them, so I won’t really be talking about those. Practical hands on experience is the best you can do.

Future?
I’m a general knowledge kind of guy, and my skills are in info gathering so a lot of my input is news articles and current trends/discussion. I also plan to write many articles about the various aspects and parts of penetration testing as started with my Rainbow Tables/Rainbow Cracking article and my discussion on Social Engineering in Penetration Testing.

Being in the business, I am up to date with the latest tools/exploits/developments so I’ll try and share that all with you.

If you have any questions, you can always contact the team.

Background
I am from The Netherlands, Europe — a country most people probably have heard about. Either because of the legendary HackTic-foundation that later started the ISP XS4ALL and otherwise undoubtably because of our liberal stance towards soft-drugs and prostitution.

I have always been drawn to computers and remember tinkering with them ever since my parents bought one, a Commodore 64. At that time, we didn’t have that much money to spend so I was forced to write my own programs and games. This experience basically laid the basis for my profession as a programmer, later in life.

As time passed, other computers came into our house-hold, mainly because of my dad’s job. Things started getting really interesting on the PC. MSDOS, PCDOS, various programming languages such as BASIC and Pascal, applications suchs as DBASE.

In contrast to people who have only experience with graphical user interfaces such as Microsoft’s and Apple’s, because of the experience with the command-line, UNIX-flavoured operating systems don’t scare me.

In the Present
Currently, I am a programmer for a media company. The operating systems I work on are all UNIX-flavours. I can ’speak’ most relevant (programming) languages available on those machines: C(++), Shell scripting, PHP, Javascript, SQL and HTML to name but a few. I have had the privilege to tinker with J2ME (that’s Java for mobile devices such as phones) as well.

I mainly implement the technology behind web-sites, such as content-management systems and various types of server-to-server communication. Additionally, I write plugins for interactive voice response systems such as Bayonne.

Additionally, I also do system administration on few of those servers so I have grown quite interested in server security as well.

In my spare time, because I’m cheap, I still write my own software. If I’m out of suggestion, my girlfriend sometimes has a request for something. For the last couple of years I love to make everything web-based. This fuelled my interest in web-based user-interfaces and the technology behind it, databases, scripting and secure communications.

Future
Being a coder, my articles will mainly focus on programming. How to, and how not to implement stuff safe and secure. Fact is, programs that rely on end-user input are by definition un-safe.

Knowing the business-side of the chain so to speak, I have come to discover that a lot of companies, simply because of the lack of knowledge, money or time, fail to implement online systems secure enough.

Technology is going faster than most people can keep track of it and this has implications that some people might ignore.

A long time ago…

…I was a big game addict, computers had no sense to me without games, this was the only use I had for them (apart from listening to music and watching movies), till the internet came into my life. I started playing on the internet as many of you I think did, chating on IRC.
The first time I got into hacking was when I first downloaded WarMaster, a quite 31337 mIRC script with many trojans included.

And then I opened my eyes…

…and realized that I couldn’t do anything, was just another lam3r showing off on IRC. At that point I started to make my own mIRC scripts, still think that metalfish was a big success, towards my scripting knowlege that is. But it was not enough…
I started to read many tutorials, white papers and so on but really couldn’t understand a big part of them so I’ve changed my orientation towards webdevelopment, this way have learned JavaScript & PHP which later become useful towards XSS.

Darknet, again?

Being in the mailinglist of darknet for quite a long beriod I was really happy to see it again on-line and up to date, so I joined it to share my knowledge, hopefully someone will apreciate this… and here I am.

In my articles…

I’m going to talk about viruses, web technologies, win related articles and so on… and why not some IRC stuff to, just to get you started, and teach you a couple of things I know, thill then make the final step and join the dark side of the internet.