About me

Who am I?

Hi, I’m David, but people also call me tomato (yeah). I’m an developer and security researcher. I got into IT 5 years ago, since then, I’ve been studying a variety of topics, you will find articles, notes and tutorials about what I’m currently studying here. I also like to automate things, so you’ll also see see posts about home-lab stuff :).

I started studying web development from scratch when a friend of mine asked me to complete some classes for him; he didn’t have the time to watch them but wanted the badge they give if you complete them all. I agreed, it was a good chance to learn new things. The classes were old but they covered a bunch of topics, including: Python tutorials, Java Development, Web Development, SQL databases and stuff like that. I knew nothing about computers at all, all I did was play games and mess with minecrafts mods all day so it took a bit of time but I finished all the classes. I was still a newbie but, at least, now I had a bit more understanding of what computers, programming languages and the web were about, it was good enough to make me realize what topics I was interest in and how I could learn them.

After a year and a half exploring new languages, topics and stacks, my mind was mesmerized not by a new topic but a new field entirely, Cyber Security. I was deeply interested in it. Since then, I’ve learned a lot of things: Web Penetration Testing, Network Security, Reverse Engineering and binary exploitation, Malware Analysis and even found bugs in Bug Bounty platforms, though they weren’t in-scope :(. Nowadays I’m more focused on Network Pentest, breaking and exploiting AD and Linux servers. I should also note that I never abandoned programming, from time-to-time I tend to start projects that seem fun, for example: A toy blockchain, miner, node and wallet, a Linux debugger, a program to track productivity based on your activity which I like to call my mini spyware and other small projects :). I also tend to spend a lot of time customizing my setup, I’ve used different distros over the time and ended up with NixOS, a really wonderful distro, you should check it out! Besides that, I like to tweak my home-lab from time to time, it’s an old notebook that I use to host a bunch of services, including this website!

What You’ll Find Here

  • HackTheBox Writeups - Walkthroughs of retired and active machines (locked), covering every step with a detailed explanation and process of thought, because knowing how to exploit something matters less than developing the mindset to recognize what’s vulnerable in the first place.
  • Homelab and OS stuff - Homelabs setups that even a complete newbie can follow and posts about my setup/environment.
  • Security Research - Articles about attacks, exploits or CVEs I found interesting and decided to write about and experiment about.

Contact

If you have an offer, opportunity, cool idea you wanna share with me or whatever would make my life more interesting, you can text me in one of the social below, pick what suits you better :))