I was about 14 and it was the summer holidays and I was working at the school that I went to and lived that.

And my dad worked there, so I lived there. I was doing general maintenance work, kind of handyman stuff, electrical work, stuff like that.

And I remember going into the boiler room at the

school and I noticed there was a phone socket on the wall with a cable coming out of it and going

into the heating system. And there was a number written above the phone socket. And I just got a modem

probably about six months before then and I was using that to connect through to bulletin board systems, BBSs.

So it's kind of predates the internet really.

This would have been about 95, 96 kind of quite a long time ago.

So you use modems to connect really, really slowly to BBSs. It was all

text-based, there were no images. And when I saw that number, I thought this is a way of connecting

to the heating system to control it. So that evening, I went home and I sat there with a bit

of software that you used to connect to the BBSs and I really had

no idea what I was doing but it was kind of at that point though I'd realized that the only thing

protecting that system was the fact that no one knew what that number was and no one knew how to

connect to it. This is Andrew Tierney, better known online as Cyber Gibbons.

Andrew has earned his reputation hacking things like thermostats, home alarms, and other hardware

like cryptocurrency wallets.

So it makes a lot of sense that his first ever hack back in the 90s was to take control

of his high school's heating system from his bedroom.

Hi, I am Lorenzo Franceschi B.irai, and this is a new episode of My First Hack, a series that

details the origin stories of hackers and security researchers.

Hi, Andrew. Thank you so much for being here. How are you doing today?

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