Hey — Welcome to the Blog

I figured I should write something that isn’t a writeup or a deep dive into AI tooling, so here it is — the “who is this guy” post.

My name’s Jesse. I’ve been messing with computers since before I understood what I was doing. My family got a Hewlett Packard when I was a kid and I went from web chat rooms to IRC to writing mIRC war scripts by the time I was 12 or 13. I didn’t know what “hacking” was — I just knew I liked making computers do things they weren’t supposed to.

Around 15, I moved to Tampa and got into a magnet school for computers. That lasted until I wrote a batch file that deleted files on the school network — my friends and I had Red Faction installed on a shared drive and I wanted to keep people from messing with it. The school called it a virus. My punishment was no computer access for the rest of the year. I had to hand-write my assignments in typing class. That was my first incident response, I guess.

This was the era of Red Hat, Slackware, burning Linux to CDs, Pentiums and Celerons. I was neck-deep in it. Then life happened — moved again, put it all down, and eventually joined the Army. Spent 20 years in, retired as a Sergeant First Class. Somewhere in there Android came out (2008) and I picked the nerd stuff back up — flashing custom ROMs, learning to build Linux kernels, reverse engineering on XDA from about 2008 to 2012.

The whole time, I knew this was what I wanted to do for a living. It just took 20 years and a military retirement to finally go after it. Now I’m here. CPTS certified, actively working through HackTheBox machines, studying for CRTO, and chasing my first dedicated offensive security role. This blog is where I dump everything I’m learning — writeups, tool experiments, methodology notes, and whatever rabbit hole I fell down that week.

What You’ll Find Here

HackTheBox writeups are the main thing right now. I try to write them so someone who’s never seen the technology before can follow along and actually learn something, not just copy commands. If I had to Google it, I’ll explain it. I’ve got a backlog of seasonal machines ready to publish once the challenges close — I’m not trying to spoil anything for anyone still working through them.

AI and offensive security content shows up occasionally. I’ve been experimenting with local LLMs as pentest assistants, building tooling, and generally trying to figure out where AI fits in this field without the hype.

I try to post once or twice a week. Sometimes life gets in the way. It happens.

Why I’m Doing This

Honestly? I need hacker friends. The infosec community is massive online but it can feel pretty isolating when you’re transitioning from a completely different career and don’t have a network of people who speak the same language. Writing publicly is my way of putting myself out there, showing my work, and hopefully connecting with people who are either on the same path or a few steps ahead and willing to share what they know.

I’m not pretending to be an expert. I’m documenting the climb. Some of these writeups will be clean and some will show me stumbling through things I’ve never seen before. That’s the point.

Let’s Connect

If anything I post is useful to you, or if you just want to talk shop — reach out. I’m always down to make new friends in this space.

• Discord: jkonpc
• Email: jkonpc@gmail.com

I don’t do the password-protected writeup thing. Everything here is free and open. So for the current season writeups, you’re going to have to wait until the season is over. If we can help each other learn, that’s the whole point.

See you around.

— Jesse