About tomwells.org

I’m a South African currently living in Johannesburg. I’ve been an internet addict for as long as I can remember - starting back in the 2400 baud days of BBSes and WinSock version 1. I’ve always been pretty good at programming, writing my first app at the age of 8 on my IBM ELF 8086 machine that my parents lovingly bought me for about R5000 (that was BIG money back in 1988! bless them). The machine eventually got riddled with viruses, including some of the classics like the cookie virus, da vinci virus, bouncing ball virus, etc. These always fascinated me, and I soon became a virus writer using some of the BBS freely available tools which are now defunct, as well as frequenting some of the darker parts of the young cyberspace which dealt with phreaking, hacking and cracking. I can remember some of the most fun I ever had was sitting with my best mate Gareth making prank calls to some of the local BBSes, and emulating line-noise by lifting and hissing into the phone while connected - harassing on-duty administrators and blocking incoming lines. Tricks such as zipping 1GB blank files and adding them 100 times to the same zip, then uploading them to be virus scanned would commonly crash the poor neighbourhood servers, but of course we never got into trouble, even with knowledge of our telephone number nothing could be done.

University in 1998 was an eye opening experience - new friends, unlimited bandwidth, irc and a freebsd machine called rucus. A couple of months later my group of friends were made famous by a couple of naughty pranks we pulled involving some irc k-line vulnerabilities plus a couple of stupid script-kiddie grade “tests” that got out of hand. Hated by the admins and labelled kiddiesoc we actually created quite a following of similar minded individuals. Eventually of course, we all grew up and became the admins, and no doubt the cycle continues to this day.

In my final year I was desperate to leave the comfort of university, and landed a very nice job at a military technology company. It was during my first year working as a junior software developer that I really learned everything I know today about programming, largely due to a set of incredibly talented and wise individuals who took it upon themselves to pass on their knowledge to a young fledgling like myself. After a really successful deployment of a massive 2 year project, I began to get itchy feet and decided to find out what the rest of the world has to offer and so left to join a much smaller pure software development house with a focus on the financial services sector. The work was very different, more windowsie and more 3G languages, far less C/C++ and almost zero unix. Far less challenging code, but much shorter deadlines, smaller teams, but more importantly far more client facing - and this is the part that is really satisfying.

Nowadays the company has since gone through an exercise of creating shards of expertise, one of which I plan to build a successful security business out of. This means diving head-first back into all the things that initially got me interested in technology, who says history doesn’t repeat itself?