I was born in 2004, so the internet was already up and running by the time I showed up. For a long time I just figured it worked, kind of like magic. I spent a lot of my childhood playing online games, and somewhere around nine years old I started getting knocked offline in the middle of matches. I didn't understand it back then. It wasn't until later, going back and reading the messages these people left taunting me, that I realized they were DDoSing a kid to win a game of Call of Duty. By the time I was 14 I had my own laptop and I was sick of it, so I downloaded Wireshark, started watching YouTube tutorials after school, and tried to figure out what was actually happening to my connection. I never caught them, but that's where this whole thing started for me.
What turned it from a hobby into something I actually cared about was watching it happen to my own family. In 2016 a close family member had their identity stolen, and it dragged on for about three years — every new fraudulent charge set off another round of panic, and it wasn't fully sorted out until late 2019. Seeing what that does to a regular person who didn't do anything wrong except use the internet stuck with me. That's the part of security I care about most: protecting people and organizations who don't deserve to get hurt.
It also gave me a goal. I want to make everyday users a harder target, because the harder people are to scam, the less it's worth an attacker's time to bother. Low Stress Cyber™ is my first real shot at that — a free, plain-English internet safety resource for people with no technical background.
Right now I'm focused on breaking into the field, whether that's an internship or an entry-level role. Honestly, I still get excited every time a class opens up a corner of security I hadn't thought about — governance and compliance and enterprise security both caught me off guard recently with how much I liked them. Whatever the role ends up being, I want to be the person a team can count on.