Timex Sinclair 1000

    Timex Sinclair 1000

OK, so some history about me: I’ve been a computer enthusiast all of my adult life. It started when I got my hands on a Timex Sinclair 1000 computer in 1983. You had to type for several hours to write the simplest of programs to memory (16kb). If you wanted to save it you had to put it on a cassette tape player which we didn’t have so once it was turned off it was all gone. Type it in again tomorrow, yay. I purchased a commodore 64 in 1984 which I used mostly for games, well OK, only for games. That’s 64k of memory. Compare that to a typical 32GB nowadays. I purchased every add-on device for it too. I took a stab at programming in basic but didn’t take to it so I am definitely not a programmer.

         Commodore 64

During my time in the military, I worked on computer mainframe devices (amongst other things). The workstation PCs were handled by an IT department. (They just weren’t called IT back then) During those years I first started out cruising bulletin boards (on a 300 baud dial up modem) until I bought some time on America Online I believe it was 1985, I also tried out CompuServe and Prodigy but stuck with AOL for many years.

In those early years, most of my time on my own computers was purely for gaming, emailing and some light surfing and socializing. I knew nothing about network security though. Sure, I knew you should have antivirus, which I did, AOL, McAfee or Norton. Did I ever let it expire? Probably so. Hey, we just never worried about viruses and never heard of malware back in the day so I guess you could say I grew up in a relatively safe network neighborhood. Heck back in the 60’s people didn’t even lock the doors on their houses. That’s just the way it was, safe. Kinda.

As for my career, I spent the years as a technical engineer specializing in satellite video broadcasting until ten years ago when I made a transition into network engineering. A bold and radical career move. I had a lot to learn real fast. Sure there was a lot of crossover into computer stuff while working as a video engineer, but it wasn’t the in depth networking that you get into with a network engineering role.

Most of my time on the internet was at work where I was protected by corporate security solutions. Up until arount 2011 I only had a few minor virus issues on my own network devices in all the years I used the internet. I now have a run in with something malicious about every three or four days. I do a lot of research on-line now though. Mostly I see Malwarebytes Anti-malware pop-ups for blocking malicious websites. They just come out of nowhere. Just visit a site and kerplow, you get nailed.

It kinda reminds me of that classic game Asteroids. You have a triangular shaped little spaceship that you maneuver and a bunch of asteroids of different sizes are flying in all directions around you, some on a collision course with you, so you go spinning in circles, zipping across the screen, constantly dodging and firing on the asteroids breaking them into smaller asteroids until you finally obliterate them all. Well that’s what the Internet’s like.

Since I got hacked in 2011 I’ve been reading every security article I could find plus trying every security software I dared to download. Does this make me an expert on the subject? Nope. I barely scratched the surface. But the vast amount of information I’ve been digesting has been overwhelming and I am horrible at organizing stuff. I’ve got stuff scattered everywhere. So I thought, maybe start a website and put all that information in one tidy spot and maybe it can even be useful to others. So here I am. I hope you enjoy the site. Feel free to leave any comments, feedback or just say hi.