We had this guy, whom I’ll call Z, who was an expert in this. We would have a need for a tool that had to scan a webserver or find an FTP that we could use to exfil files while on the field, he would grab his laptop and have the script ready in a matter of minutes. Z was really good at this.  Then we had another guy, called Y, who could pick a lock in under 5 seconds or bypass alarm systems with pliers and a voltage sensor; he could map the blind spots of security cameras and provide the best movement plan. We also had X, a gorgeous female hacker who loved to bruteforce passwords and crack codes and protocols. She would be usually our go-to girl for figuring ways to bypass login screens, prompts or analyze the stuff that was flowing back and for on a port belonging to a service we didn’t know. Finally we had W, he was a network wiz. He could figure out the way a network was mapped, how the routers, firewalls and other network appliances were set and configured.

My speciality was in social engineering and finding and coding ways to extract the information once we were in, be it in the form of hidden channels on TCP packets or DNS requests, or by implementing backdoors or trojans that reported back to a server somewhere in the world, I was also in charge of the ever important C2 part of the backdoors, a piece of software that would allow us to control the penetrated systems remotely from a TOC. Since social engineering was my task and I have a background as a sniper I would be usually in charge or setting the infils for our team and having all the contingency plans for the exfil as well, I would spend countless hours on the field sneaking in different holes.

It was a good team. We worked well together and we had fun doing it.