After disappearing for a month I have finally returned and OH MAN. What a month. There was a LHE in my hometown of Cork in Ireland, and Ads Dawson (0xmoose). We collabed, and reported 68 bugs to the target program. We really tried hard to win Best Hacker and we had the most bugs of the event, but it wasn’t meant to be. It was still an amazing experience and attending a LHE in Cork was incredible - it was symbolic, in a way, of my journey, starting off in Cork 5 to 6 years ago, and culminating in a tremendous hacking effort with Ads in a LHE 6 years later. It is poetic.

Next month I’m attending Google’s next Bugswat in Singapore. I’m working on my hackbot to lay some groundwork for that.

After that, I’ll be at the upcoming Prompt2Pwn conference in Oakland, California in November! It’s an in-person NahamCon, essentially. I’ve never been to San Francisco, so I’m very excited.

Most of the time, I’m still at home with the cats - these trips are about one week per month at most.

I moved within Edinburgh to a cheaper apartment. I’m expecting to be here at least until my girlfriend finishes her final year of university this year, so saving a few hundred pounds a month in rent was a good idea. It took a while to find a place because I have my two cats with me, but I eventually found a really nice place that’s close to nature, and close to my office. The cats adapted to it very quickly as well. I spent a lot of time moving things and organising my belongings, so that used up a ton of my time before the LHE.

I don’t think I can talk about the target, but Ads and I managed to deliver 68 reports in two weeks! That’s the best I’ve ever done in a LHE. The reality is that while I can make it to LHEs once or twice a year, I struggle to find as many highs and crits as the others. I don’t think this is an issue of hacking skill, but rather hacking approach. The untold part of LHEs is that every team has their own threat model, and some hackers are already familiar with what the team considers to be a High or a Crit. This is a giant advantage in the competitive LHE environment, and figuring out what they pay out for is an absolutely crucial aspect of competing for the top awards. Of our 68 reports, many were mediums, but LHEs are won on criticals.

While my partner and I were back in Cork, we went to the national park in Killarney. My dad handles a lot of the cartography in that area for orienteering maps (which, if you’re unfamiliar, is a sport involving navigation across mountains and running to a series of checkpoints as fast as possible). Certain endangered trees (English Whitebeams) were supposed to be out-of-bounds from the map, but the coordinates from the wildlife surveys were inaccurate, so we wandered around the woods for a few hours to identify the exact locations of them and correct the maps. We saw a lot of interesting mushrooms. It was a great break from the nonstop hacking.

I made some lifestyle changes along with my move. I’ve started budgeting seriously. I’m not sure who this might help, but I always struggled to follow budgets. But this time, I set up “pots” or “spaces”, which are little sub-categories within my bank account where I can allocate money, and they don’t show up on my main balance. This way, the number on the screen is the number I can actually use for discretionary expenses. This really made me focus on saving, and now I’m hooked. I’ve bought a french press instead of buying £5 coffees every day. So, if you’ve also struggled to stick to budgets, this pot allocation thing really works. Just find a bank account that allows you to do that - most of the digital banks support some variation of this feature.

I’ll start a channel soon - I had an extremely busy few weeks, but I finally have time to work on this idea. I have a green screen on the way. It’s happening. Albeit slowly.