The confession first.

It is 1993 and I am twelve years old. Being online costs three dollars an hour, a single blurry photo takes four minutes to load, and my friends and I have registered the screen name A-zero-L-tech, spelled with a zero so it looks like it belongs to the people in charge. We drop into chat rooms posing as AOL staff, and people hand us their passwords the moment they believe we have a badge. That is the whole lesson of my life in one sentence: people do not trust the person, they trust the costume. I phreaked phones, I poked at every system a kid could reach, and none of it was for money. It was love of the game.

Then one Tuesday morning in 2001, I was twenty years old, doing phone-based IT support for a major financial firm, on a call with a client in the first tower. I will not say more about that morning than I have to. It was the day the game stopped being a game, and the day I switched sides for good.

The years since have been spent as a security consultant across financial services, retail floors, and telecom, chasing the same tricks I pulled as a kid and teaching regular people to beat them. The scripts have not changed. The caller pretending to be your bank is running my old A0Ltech play with better tools, and the fake utility worker at your door is wearing the same costume with a clipboard instead of a screen name.

The Home Defense Guides are that career on paper: short, direct manuals that take one threat at a time, show you the attacker’s view of it, and hand you the counter. The live seminars are the same material with the volume up. The audits are me applying it to your actual property, in person.

I live in New Bedford, Massachusetts, with my family. My favorite band is the Ramones and the WNBA won me back to basketball. Go Sun.