In those days, even though it was after the Morris War, people were still in universities,

kind of the expectation that computers are there to play with us as students to learn on and to stretch their boundaries.

And it wasn't a big deal if a computer or two got hacked as long as it wasn't like an important

system.

And just so that I think I understand this, but essentially you had full control of the teachers

or the professor's computer, correct?

Right.

This is Rob Graham, an independent security researcher who is also known as a ratarob on Twitter.

What if you could go back in time and make sure you made the deadline on a college assignment?

That's basically what Rob did by hacking his professor.

Rob is very well known in the community for having created Mascan, a tool that lets anyone scan the internet in just a few minutes.

He's also pretty famous for his sometimes controversial hot takes on Twitter.

Rob was recently at the ridiculed cybersecurity conference organized by the MyPillo CEO.

He was one of the only actual experts there and one of the few people who wore a mask.

This is Lorenzo Franceschi B. KRI and this is My First Hack,

a series that details the origin stories of hackers and security researchers.

Hi Rob, thanks for being on the show.

I'm very excited to have you here.

You're obviously kind of an infosec tutor celebrity,

so I'm sure that a lot of listeners are just as excited. And yeah, thank you so much. My pleasure. So yeah, let's get

into it. What's your, you know, what was your first hack? What's Rob's origin story?

Well, as a hacker or as a geek or a nerd or a techie, there's lots of first hacks,

...