Hello, Welcome. I am WonderingRaven the lurker of DefCon for over 20 years. I started attending Defcon since 1998, riding my bicycle from North Las Vegas to Harmon and Paradise. I was attending because I was curious about what is going on with cyber security and the term “hacking”.
I adopted the nickname WonderingRaven because I used to work at k-mart in 1997 – 1998, during that time I worked with someone that went to the A-Tech highschool while I went to Rancho highschool. They went with the nickname alias of “WanderingRaven”, I liked it but I was more of one who wondered a lot and is always curious. Because I also went to Rancho High School I always wondered if I will survive a day without getting stabbed or robbed. I was a super big fan of The Crow, Marilyn Manson, and Edgar Allen Poe so I went with Raven and put the two together as an Online Alias of “The Wondering Raven”
I also adopted the nickname Kallador, the lone warrior. due to the Limit of Nickname lengths back in the 90’s WonderingRaven was too big to use on irc networks like Efnet and DALnet. In the Early to Mid-90’s I was developing a comic book that I wanted to turn into a nice 3rd person game that took place in an Post-Apocalyptic world. With PS1 out and N64 released I was inspired to learn “computers” so I can pick up 3d modeling and programming and build my own game around the comic book I was writing.
I became a lurker in Defcon because every time I go there because I don’t know anyone and I suffer from “People Anxiety” I get extremely shy and quiet around everyone I don’t know and I used to get extremely deathly afraid of people in general.
My career in IT started when I took over a local ISP network and patched them up from a lot of multiple Sun OS – Solaris & Redhat vulnerabilities. After doing so, I applied for a job at the local ISP and got accepted from there I worked there for a greater of 10 years Waring a multiple job hat from Systems Engineering, Networking with Cisco equipment, tech support, and other misc Co-Location and ISP (Internet Service Provider) services.