My Hacking Journey Part 1: NPC to security researcher

Growing up, I was always fascinated by the workings of computers. I would spend hours tinkering with them, trying to understand their complexities and pushing their limits. But little did I know that this fascination would eventually lead me down the path of cybersecurity and hacking.

It all started during my teenage years around 10th class when I developed a fascination for sci-fi and action movies like Micky Virus, Genius, The Return of Abhimanyu, Hacked, Untraceable, Shree, Whoami, Tron, Takedown, Hackers, and The Matrix, and many others. These movies piqued my interest in the world of hacking. Initially, it was curiosity that drew me towards hacking. I wanted to understand how hackers bypassed security measures and gained unauthorized access to computer systems. I started reading articles and watching videos online, trying to understand the basics of hacking.

After watching Mr. Robot (web series) in 12th class, I became more interested in Ethical Hacking. In December 2019, during my first year of B.E/B.tech in Computer Science, I came across a hacking workshop at IIT Bombay that costed me around 1k INR. Which I decided to attend it. There, for the first time, I saw the same Kali Linux that was shown in Mr. Robots, which was vastly different from Windows. I was amazed to discover that really there were other operating systems besides Windows, such as Linux (Kali Linux, Ubuntu, Debian), Mac, and others.