This dates back to when I was in high school around start of my 10th grade. I got access to internet for the first time in my life ¹.

Up until this point, my only interactions with a computer was purely as a device for gaming. I used to spend a disproportionate of time playing games ².

I made an account on facebook and played the games on it cause it was all the rage at the time. There were two specific games that I played mafia wars and mousehunt. Both of which are suprisingly active even now!

But the general idea in these games was to check in once a while and take action. For mousehunt it was every 15 minutes and you had to click a “Sound the horn” button. The server determines what the result was based on your setup of traps and cheese that you had used. You earn gold for every successful mouse caught. The game also had a way to gift other people gold and cheese which constitutes the currency in game.

This led to something interesting at school, the game was so popular that kids at my school traded in game currency for real money. If that wasn’t any indication that the game was being taken too seriously I don’t know what is.

How does any of this relate to Computer Science?!

I’m getting there…

So this one time a kid at school had his facebook account hacked and all of his gold was stolen. There was a big fight between two kids over this virtual currency. I was curious on he got a hold of the password. Surely he couldn’t have just guessed the password or his security question ³.

A friend of mine explained it in the simplest of terms to me at the time.

“Imagine a physical facebook page made of paper. He just replaced the original facebook webpage with a copy of it and stripped out the email and password fields”

I was mindblown. Later I found out this was called phishing and that it required sending a fake facebook link to people. It was the beginning of a rabbit hole in learning how to hack computers. I was so intrigued by this whole concept that you can take control of another person’s account sitting at the comfort of your home. I spent every other day that year on youtube videos and forums finding out as much as I can about it. Phishing was too basic and obvious.

There was a much better alternative called trojan horses where you send innocuous files to another person and taking control of their computer when they open it. But an antivirus would detect them. So I looked up if there was any way of getting past it.

Of course there was. They were called crypters where it modifies the trojan horse such that it couldn’t be detected by an antivirus. I tried that too. Antivirus companies weren’t dumb. They just detected that you used a crypter instead of detecting a trojan horse.

Now there were two alternatives

• either buy an undetected crypter at one of the forums
• or make my own crypter

As I was broke and couldn’t really explain to my parents that I wanted to buy something for hacking other people. I decided to write one myself.

This is where I realized it wasn’t something that easy. All this time all I was researching into was downloading software and scripts and just running them. I didn’t have to understand anything beyond that. Now I had to understand how to write a crypter and that involved coding at a level where I had to understand how executable file formats, antivirus detection methods and most importantly how to write the code for it.

Up until this point I never paid attention to computer programming despite having taken classes years earlier that most poeple my age.

Well now I had to learn things far beyond what was being taught at school and I didn’t know where to start. Well for one I started paying a lot more attention to the programming classes at school (Thank goodness they covered Java and User Interfaces right then instead of C++).

I slowly started realizing that programming was actually a very fun exercise. It gave you so much satisfaction where everything that you’ve written compiles and comes together in one piece in the end. I’d eventually lose my interest in hacking (not having hacked even person in the entire venture lol) and come to the realization that it wasn’t worthwhile and illegal.

So there you have it. This was what sparked my interest into programming, hope the folks reading this have similar stories leading into their passion/careers!