There’s an old joke in hacker lore about a n00b script kiddie bragging on himself and asking for an IP address to hack. Someone tells him 127.0.0.1, and he gamely starts hacking—unaware that it’s a loopback address and he is actually hacking his own machine.

I’d always thought that was funny—which just made it ironic that this was what I was going to have to do now. I could get out to the Internet. Now I’d just have to turn right around and hack right back into where I was coming from—preferably without whoever was pulling my strings noticing.

This could prove to be one of the most important hacks of my life. It would be a challenge—but I was up to it. I opened some ssh sessions and began.

It was almost disappointing how easy it was. There were security measures, firewalls and passwords, but they all felt “off-the-shelf”—it was like someone had slapped them up without knowing how to optimize them.

Almost disappointing—but what I found once I got in wiped all thoughts of disappointment from my mind.