I'm glad that even if you found my teenage hacking handle, the forum it was used on is long defunct and not indexed by the wayback machine.

I drifted away from security research in my early 20s partly because of the fear instilled reading about Kevin's trials and tribulations[1]...

I think teens today think they're elite when they forget that bitcoin and even pre-paid cards, nor ubiquitous wifi were present in those times.

It's a lot easier to be anonymous nowadays -- gone are the days of scanning for poorly secured SSH boxes to use as jump boxes, now someone can go off to Starbucks and spin up a whole ass botnet or just get a burner sim to use for a month as a hotspot.

They conflate that ability to hide in the noise as a mark of skill, and then they make mistakes.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20050619225554/https://www.linux...