Orange Cyberdefense’s ethical hacking director and SA MD, Dominic White, was on the path to a career in cybersecurity the day he got his hands on a computer.
“As I figured out first how to use the new tech that was showing up all around us, then figured out how it worked… the natural next step was always to try make it work differently,” he said.White honed his skills with school and university friends through play. Their rules were simple: they could hack each other in any way possible but had to respect personal privacy and share how they did it with everyone.
White’s first real hack was the shared “RUCUS” Unix server at Rhodes, which landed him in a heap of trouble. “Sometimes you’re just worried or interested in whether a service you’re using personally is secure.” White said the moral imperative to help society rather than hurt it remains the guiding principle when they discuss what to do internally.
However, this is increasingly less the case. White said this is noteworthy for organisations, as they should scrutinise their penetration testing reports for the attack chain, not just individual findings. “Secondly, the more time we spend on a specific environment, the more understanding and skill we develop in it, allowing us to find more obscure or hard-to-exploit vulnerabilities,” he added.
“The complexity here is always to contextualise that within the scope of attacker trends and the wider trend,” he noted.