
William Burton
About
I am a 40 year old Cape Breton geek who stumbled across cyber security thanks to a friend (and mentor) who is in the industry, and have been consuming content and learning as much as I could about the industry since October.
Why I am interested in the technology industry
Back in the mid 2000s, I was working on a passion project website hosted by godaddy. I learned a bit of HTML in a graphic design course I took in 2002/2003, but I wanted to learn about PHP and MySQL. So I downloaded a content system called ‘PHPBB’ or PHP Bulletin Board. It was basically an early version of an online forum. After it was up and I was playing around with it on my own for about 3 days, I logged in to see a front page image that said ‘Hacked by hacker Merkezi’. So the first thing I did, was logged into my godaddy host portal, and checked the SQL database, and noticed a new account that was flagged as an admin. So I deleted that. I then checked a log, that showed the links to all of the web pages that people clicked a link to my page from and saw one entry. I clicked it and it took me to a forum page with my website linked. but it was in a foreign language. I couldn’t read the language but I could navigate the forum. I saw a pinned thread and clicked on it. I couldn’t read what it said, but it showed images of a phpbb forum, where they were replying to a post. But were putting SQL code into the reply field. It very clearly read that it was adding a new user to the database, and flagging the Admin option as True. At the time, i never heard of the concept of cyber security, and this experience scared me away from making my own website. My philosophy at the time was if it’s this easy to hack these websites, I don’t want to create a site, and endanger the information of the users of that site. Though it did hurt my pride a bit, i was happy that I was able to investigate the attack and find out exactly what happened, and how it happened. But I was too afraid to take the investigation any further. I knew I wouldn’t get any justice, and I also figured if they could hack my website, they might be able to hack my computer. Fast forward nearly 20 years later, and my love for tech grew, But in September of 2022, Ashley Burke (a former Skills for Hire student) hosted a panel on the open security summit about cyber security. She was a friend of mine, and I wanted to see what she had to say. From that point, I was hooked on Cyber Security. I have become a practitioner of cyber security, by improving my password sanitation, and changing my social media presence, and I’ve been studying and learning as much as I can about the field with the dream of hopefully entering the field.