She hacked her first computer in middle school. She did it because of a boy. Which sounds like the start of a cutesy teen movie, but it's wasn't because the boy was cute, or because she was trying to impress the boy, it was because the boy was annoying.
Which still sounds like a cutesy teen movie, actually. Except there was no prolonged period of the boy being annoying until that one day she realized he was actually adorable. He was annoying then. He stayed annoying the whole time they went to school together and she had to assume he was annoying to this very day.
But she did owe her career to him, so he was good for something.
It had started when he was bragging over lunch about hacking into the school's computer program. She listened to him talk about having access to everything and all of the things he could change if he wanted to. She asked why he didn't. He didn't really have an answer. Then she asked him how he did it. He didn't really have an answer for that either. Finally she figured out that he hadn't hacked into anything at all. He had found the Principal's secretary's password on a sheet of paper near her desk and had just logged on with it. No hack at all.
But could somebody do it? The schools had been teaching them how to code since second grade. Nothing major at first, they didn't even call it coding back then, but it was all building blocks to the coding they were working on in Computer Sciences now. She had always liked it. She liked math, she liked puzzles, she like language arts and writing code seemed to blend all of those things together. So if they were going to teach them all how to code, and she was good at what they were teaching her then maybe she should try. And it would be actual hacking, not finding a password which was totally lame.
It was pretty disappointing in the end. It only took her a few hours and she was able to do it from the computers in the school lab. It seemed too easy. Which was what she programmed the internal bulletin board for the staff to read. "Attention: It took me less time to hack this system than it did to finish my English homework" She thought that might throw them off of her scent since she could clearly finish her English homework in record time.
The firm that the school hired to close up the gaps she had exploited to get into the system was able to trace the activity back to the computer lab, making her grateful she hadn't done it from home. Then they came in to give them what she had assumed would be a stern talking to, and instead became a job pitch. They explained that what had been done was illegal but as nothing malicious was done, and as the person who did it alerted them to the breach right away, it actually fell into what they called White Hat Hacking. And it was an actual job someone could do. A job that could pay really well, without the risk of going to jail. Because, again, what she had done was illegal.
The annoying boy was turned in by someone who had overheard him bragging about hacking the computer. He got in school suspension for stealing the password but was cleared of the hacking charge. Since he didn't really hack anything. And then everyone knew he didn't hack anything which was probably worse punishment for him. She hadn't told anyone of her exploits, bragging was never the point, just doing it was, so nobody turned her in.
But she did start learning more and more about hacking systems. Black and White hat. People who did it for fun, people who did it for profit, people who did it just to amuse themselves. The variety of reasons why and how people broke into the code running everything, everywhere was almost as interesting to her as sitting down and trying to break the code herself. After college she went to work for a security firm trying to find any flaws from their clients that could be exploited before someone else found them. She also did freelance work. Which mainly consisted of her looking for flaws in websites she visited on her own then collecting the bounties most companies offered to people like her for finding the issues and bring them to their attention instead of exploiting them or selling the information.
Which is how she found herself sitting in front of a computer screen with more lines of code than she had ever seen realizing that she was looking at a program that literally covered the whole world. Information from every country. Information from every town. Information from every person.
She had hacked Santa's Naughty and Nice List.
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