Tips for working as a "freelance security pro"

Figured I would just ask here, I am unsure if the mods here will tolerate posts like this. I am already a cybersecurity professional , and have been pentesting and doing security for awhile. Anyone have any tips or resources for working "((computer security))" jobs? Best forums or sites to find work is pretty much what I am looking for, or guides/ezines on working in the field. I used to frequent Torum, Dreaddit and a few other places that focused on "((computer security))" work. If any guys who work in this field, do you recommend it? I despise corporate security; this soykaf is truly a meme field full of fuarrrking posers. From my own research, there is a pretty wide range of options for work: 1.Dump databases, sell the info on forums or autoshops. 2.R-ware 3. Freelance jobs 4. Taking over accounts 5. DD0s 6. Maintain markets or other shops 7. Make exploits/tools and sell/rent them.

>despise corporate security; this soykaf is truly a meme field full of fuarrrking posers i think you misunderstand the job. Your job is selling them a cert that they spend money on security and thus fulfilled obligations. Thats what they want, not heres a study why your system is soykaf and needs a boatload of money to fix. Marketing is just good customer service part of the game because the better you market yourself the more legit their cert looks.

Where you live is important. If you're in the US, you're both more likely to get punished being a blackhat and more able to make a living being a whitehat. If you're actually good and not just a poser, you can get paid contract for pentesting through programs like Synack or HackerOne, or hunt bug bounties.

>>15920 Corporate security is nothing but selling bullshit endpoint protections and AV that don't work, and customers actually don't give a soykaf about what vulnerabilities you find. No one really understands the implications of cybersecurity except people who take pride in it as a profession. Just my opinion from what I have experienced. >>15921 From what I've gathered, as long as you don't brag about doing ((freelance work)) and practice good opsec( use stolen wifi with a long range antenna, switch out hacked wifi spots, change your MAC address, use encryption on your hard drive/on your VMs, connect to a VPS you bought with monero in a country that isn't friendly to your own, and ssh into that server over Tor.) then you don't have much to fear. All the hackers I have researched that have gotten caught either bragged about it or used some personal email with their soykaf.

>>15922 I believe most biz guys get that getting things stolen is bad and depending on what it could kill them on pr too. The main problem is you cant sell me "your stuff will never get stolen" even if we ignore budget limits. So what this sums up into is just an expense without visible returns. Maybe it prevented something but the only thing guaranteed is you cost money and annoyed everyone involved with you cant do this you cant do that. I liked how a guy on a sec conference put it: Sec is not a service for the legitimate user, you merely kill his productivity with limitations. Sec is a service for the attacker. Everything you do is tailored to him not the legitimate user and thats why its a hard sell.

>>15922 >All the hackers I have researched that have gotten caught either bragged about it or used some personal email with their soykaf. this is a big one people forget. try and delete any form of social media or old forum accounts you can remember using. if i remember correctly the guy who created the silkroad got caught because of some forum posts he made years prior among other things

>>15917 >If any guys who work in this field, do you recommend it? I despise corporate security; this soykaf is truly a meme field full of fuarrrking posers. If you think corporate is full of posers you'd be going from bad to worse. People doing half the stuff you listed know even less, teenagers from russia or romania or whatever that can't hold a job and don't have to if they ignore russian speaking systems. That's 90% of it, at least. If this was about money you'd be writing ransomware already and wouldn't bother asking. Personally I would say don't do DDoSing or whatever stupid stuff and instead just look for pentesting work. You already want to hack stuff so just become a consultant or something. People pay you ridiculous money to know things (whether you actually do or not) and you get to still get to break in and write malware or whatever. Be a consultant, join a corporate red team instead, or just be a g-man and hack Iran or something. Try to work for a security firm, and not just some corporate blue team. That's where you'll make money and still do interesting stuff. You won't have to go through life watching your back. Best of luck. >>15922 Some stuff is legit. VPNs, MFA, locked down bastion hosts, NIDS, etc. The detection and network segmentation measures of enterprise networks are probably the most effective tools. Those would give you a sense of who does what and when, whether that is suspicious, and how to shut things down and prevent lateral movement. That's the stuff that actually works. >>15932 Making forum posts definitely isn't a good idea but it isn't the main problem. The problem was that he cross-contaminated IDs between those forum posts and his real identity. Just to call himself 'altoid'.

>>15932 >if i remember correctly the guy who created the silkroad got caught because of some forum posts he made years prior among other things Not the whole story. He went to caffee with his laptop to promote his tor website on various forums. He used VPN and did a lot of good precautions. However, he promoted the tor website first so police thought that the account might be connected to him (since nobody knew about the site than him so it would be logical for him to promote it). The website owner gave the police the IP (which was VPN). VPN gave real IP to police, which was the caffee and then they asked Google if caffee IP matched with his MAC on any particular google accounts. And that is how they connected his forum posts promoting silkroad to his personal google account

>>16013 >then they asked Google if caffee IP matched with his MAC on any particular google accounts Have you ever heard of the ISO OSI model?

>>15921 >or hunt bug bounties I used to make decent money this way but I stopped because time and time again, id find a bug, report it and get back "oh we already knew about this" so sorry we can't pay you time and time again, so i gave up

>>16014 nope, whats that

>>16018 If its not closed theres still an ebay equivalent for bugs where you can sell them. I found this auction system more sensible regardless - if they care the company can buy it. If not up for others to grab. Capitalism ho.

>>16018 >finessed just profit elsewhere >>15917 watch out for privacy first if you do. even owning a phone and using a clipboard is just as compromising as any dumb thing you can think of like posting your information on a public paste site. fun hint: apps or the system can database its nearby device IDs such as wifi/bluetooth mac, it's the same thing as the covid bluetooth beacons so keep that in mind. you use X laptop for black security soykaf? phone knows which router and laptop you use by being in the vicinity.

>>16009 Yeah I mean I work in the cybersecurity field. You look at all the talks and webinars and realize one thing: They are all talking out of their ass and are not REAL hackers. Real hackers choose to become cyber criminals because its the ultimate "edge". It's the ultimate reward vs risk, and if you pull it off its undeniable you are "31337". Being able to live invisibly from society, living off the coin you earned after the last database heist you pulled. Living for the next job, not knowing if this is the run that ends your career. You live like a rebel, and don't work in the system, you are outside it. That's ultimate freedom. >>16020 Was it a autoshop? I heard those exist for hackers to dump off credit cards, and if people buy them the hacker gets paid. An autoshop is an automatic shop where you can go load your coin into and just select what product you want (Typically stolen cards or proxies) and it's instantly given to you.) Think of it like a vending machine, doesn't require a person to operate. This is to avoid the need for the shop owner or a middleman to manually release the data to you himself and so they can just let it run for days and have the coin collect through a mixer on some wallet.

>>16023 Yeah all "guides on security" I have read have said that anonymously via crypto or cash buy a laptop, don't ever connect it to your home wifi, and install linux without systemd and you are good to go. Same with various wireless cards you buy with your wifi adapters.

>>16009 I found this on a darkweb forum: What you need to understand is that at the current time of writing there are only three real main groups of which you can do business as in the Darknet community. Identity thieves, Blackhats, and Kingpins. You need to specialize in one field or another and dedicate your time and resources to it. And while there are cross-breeds they are few and far apart. In this talk I'll be covering how to become a Blackhat in the Darknet and what exactly that entails. Now as far as what you can and cannot do in the circle of the Blackhat there's really no limit. Though as idealistic as that sounds it's not quite how reality works, you're still at the whims of the free market after all. Which I'm going to be covering, as well as some thoughts on furthering your trade. The first thing you want to keep in mind is that when it comes to your customers, you're selling off to three main groups. Spies, other Blackhats or Identity theives. You'll occasionally get a random intruder or a security researcher if you're dealing with the public markets however, which is the main reason most Blackhats tend to stick to their inner circles of invite only forums. Essentially if Brian Krebs is your biggest threat you're not in a real Blackhat community. Sticking to invite only forums helps cut down a lot on what's discovered or bragged about, you'll find that even the Russians don't want to deal with the public markets mostly for this reason. As among the only circle of the three I mentioned at the beginning of the talk you're responsible for providing technical products and providing yourself as a contact who can do technical things. So keep this in mind when starting out as to what you should be aiming for. You're essentially the source of what keeps the Darknet intact and running on its toes. The role of the Blackhat is one that makes the Darknet as powerful as it is. One option available to you is being a complete techhead and solely focusing on technical services. Though another viable and popular option is to focus solely on Identity Theft while using your technical skills to enhance your trade which will make you extremely good at fraud. The point is, take what's given to you in this class. Your niche, find it. Once you figure out what you enjoy doing the most, stick with it and master it until your eyes go numb and you find yourself sleeping on top of piles of coin. Now as far as what you can go about selling to the Identity thieves, there are a good number of things you can do. Database selling is among the finest and easiest ways to earn a nice inflow of constant coin. Finding and targeting sites that have potentially rich customers and then selling the database to an autoshop may be more your level if you just need a few hundred + monthly or weekly (depending on how many you hack and to whom you sell to). For anyone unfamiliar, an autoshop is an automatic shop where you can go load your coin into and just select what product you want (Typically stolen cards or proxies) and it's instantly given to you. Think of it like a vending machine, doesn't require a person to operate. This is to avoid the need for the shop owner or a middleman to manually release the data to you himself and so they can just let it run for days and have the coin collect through a mixer on some wallet. For anyone interested in selling off a database, go around the public forums and ask if anyone is willing to buy. Chances are you'll get some queries and prices + jabber contacts to communicate with the staff. Most times out of none it'll end with you giving the entire database to the autoshop owners and then they give you the coin as your cards are sold off. Every shop will give you a different cut of the take so shop around and get queries to find the best bang for your buck. However also keep in mind that just because a shop gives you the biggest cut doesnt mean they are the best option as another thing you want to take into mind is the popularity of the shop. For example, a shop gives you 70% of whatever cards get sold off. However the downside of the shop offering is that they have a bad reputation and very few people actually do business there. So now your cards are sold off to a shop that is getting very little traffic and generating you very little income. Weigh the pros and cons for each offer you receive and ask around to ask whats the most popular or if the owner is a scam artist etc. Or better yet, ask your contacts. Trusted nyms only. It's not extreme money but It's good as its a constant inflow of cash that you don't really have to manage and only need to put in a few days work for. Of course for this to work, you not only have to steal databases and the like. But you have to do it undetected. Nobody is going to pay top dollar for a database that Whitehats are screaming is hacked. Mostly because people cancel cards and change passwords. However it also has to do with public attention not being preferable to a Darknetter. Another topic I'd like to discuss is weaponized Exploits, which is an entirely different market for the most part than malware but I'll get to that in a bit. The weaponized Exploit market is very exclusive, it's not something that most vendors openly sell to the public for various well thought out reasons. The first being that reputation is all you have on the Darknet, and most times out of none when you sell advanced kits or products to normal people who are like "oo yea ill just infect my ex girlfriend!" you get bad reviews, bad publicity, and bad headaches because said buyer doesn't know how to handle your product. Another reason most don't sell to the public for the advanced techniques is to keep it out of the hands of Whitehat scum and researchers who would love nothing more than to buy it and publish it in order to get some pocket change and e-fame for the discovery. By ensuring that only trusted and skilled nyms are allowed for these markets, the techniques and exploits being sold off wont have their lid blown off by some scrub before the client is able to execute the 0day. The fact that the forums and circles for weaponized Exploits are highly invite only means that if you're not proven legit and contributing or you don't have an in-guy you're not buying. People this high up in the circles just want to deal with strict business and typically don't have time for asinine bullshit, so why not choose an inner circle with nothing but the best and most reputable? As far as malware selling goes, these circles range from medium-level invite only forums to public markets. Most stick to public markets if they have a whole support team at-the-ready to help you get started with you freshly bought kit if you have no idea what the fuarrrk you're doing. Which is typically the case when the vendors Malware is trying to be sold on a mass level. However as for the higher-skilled requirement Malware you'll mostly see those being sold off on the forums and will likely not touch the public markets for the most part. Now as far as actual malware kits go, I've seen some really crazy soykaf. Like really specific purpose malware that goes far beyond just ransomware and RATs. The reason you don't hear them being reported by the Whitehats though is because the really custom level advanced soykaf is because: A) Not generic enough to be detected by Antivirus. And B) It's not super widespread, so even if the researchers did want to see what was infected or how many they would have a really tough time as they'd have to dig through a lot of soykaf. Of course once you have the Malware created, the benefit to that over 0days is that 0days lose their polish/shine after the first buy (even though it's typically sold for an ungodly sum of money) whereas Malware can be sold over and over again and can only get more popular. So go over the pros and cons and decide what it is you want to do if you're aiming for the malicious programming fields. And if you plan on mastering one craft or are good at one thing and love it, stick to it and don't let it go until you perfect it before you even consider moving on to something else. Another possible to-do if you're into server side defense and want in on the game is admining and lording over both public markets and things like autoshops. Even markets need admins. On top of which you'll get an extremely nice cut as autoshops and markets mostly make millions yearly and they're sure to take care of their admins.

>>16030 (cont) You won't have any set hours (obviously) though you're going to want to be online as much as possible to ensure your clients happiness and business, because their happiness and business is your profit. You could even manage/admin multiple sites and just take away a near cool 200k+ yearly if you're super lazy and don't want to go hunting for work all too much. Though again the choice is yours. Lastly if you're super lazy just list yourself off as an odd-job guy, you'll definitely be able to put food on the table as Identity thieves and Kingpins are almost always needing a Techie for something. And obviously the better reputation you have the higher the price/more clients you can nab so it's definitely something to consider. You may not make AS MUCH but you'll definitely not go hungry if you've built up your reputation correctly. When all is said and done though, these obviously aren't the only things you can do when involved with the community. There are some contacts who just go out and Dox/Hack/SE information off of really rich people and then sell it off at a nice price. There are some contacts who focus on nothing but rooting .gov's and .edu's to harvest it for parts by selling off things like emails or shells for whatever reason. All of this works. You can obviously do whatever you think of so long as it's profitable and people need the product/service, though if you're going to go your own way like this keeping a few principles in mind may help you out a lot. First being that historically, the underworld solely exists to provide what the governments have derezzed or disallowed, otherwise they'd be legal businessmen/woman. Second being, decide who you want to deal with the most in terms of public level people or the skilled (Other Blackhats/Kingpins/Identity Thieves) as it'll greatly help you decide how you should shape out your product and promotion/advertising. And on a closing note, if you are going to go the Blackhat route when involving yourself in the community I wanna make two points. First being if you're going to have the fuarrrking gall to claim to be a Blackhat, you better know what the fuarrrk you're on about or you will get pummeled by those who do. And secondly, the wisest thing to do in this field is to specialize in an area/trade but keep your paws in all the other trades too. As a Blackhat on the Darknet you're expected to be a one man army and a swiss pocket knife with your contacts filling in the blank for anything you don't know. So keep that in mind when you find yourself balls deep in a game you'll not want to likely pull out of. If you've read this far you've come to the end of the class. If you have a question, you can ask here here on the forum. If you ask me for direct advice or inform me of something illegal you should assume that I will report you to the feds. Trust no one.

>>16031 Some more from the dark web: A good start is the ethical hacking courses as they do teach you a methodology to learn from and you're able to apply it in other ways. However, I highly suggest focusing your hacking efforts on things that will make you money and ignore everything else. Web application hacking and being able to compromise an individual or company directly is what you should be up to date on as this is the bulk of "hacking" these days. It's not just learning the art of hacking that can be difficult but trying to figure out where to focus your learning and efforts can get all fuarrrked up. There's so many ways to monetize your "hacking" skills but this varies from individual to individual. I think it's important to know what your skill level is and what you're capable of doing successfully and anonymously plays a huge role. Some ways I've made money are: - Compromising individuals with a RAT to siphon online accounts to sell individually after (annoying) - Deploy ransomware (somewhat profitable depending) - Take on hacking requests to fulfill client goals (difficult to find real clients who understand what's required just take a look at the Services section here) - Blackmail/account take over - DDoS In my experience: I've made the most by hacking jobs on the side, RATing, account take overs, and ransomware. I've hacked people and siphoned their online accounts, made a vendor account on AB and sold them as needed. Sure I made money but it was a lot of manual work and kind of annoying. I wouldn't recommend that avenue. The hacking firm I worked in and out of you were given the target by them and the request by the client. The pay can vary but this was a great way to supplement my income at the time. There was times I'd be given the target information and I literally ran sqlmap with default settings with the" --forms" option against a form on the target webpage and found a SQLi. An hour of work and I made just over $8000 USD for doing this. This would happen frequently but as I began to do my research on the clients that were hiring me through this hacking firm that's when things when a little upside down. The work is always there and I can come and go as I please. But still. Ransomware. It's profitable but I think people are targeting larger organizations these days looking for higher payouts. People like you, me, and everyone here should be thinking much more on a smaller scale. My advice is don't think globally like the stuff you read about or listen to. Learn about other hacks that are done, what other "professional" hackers are doing, cyber criminals, etc. but think about how you can incorporate that knowledge in your black hatting daily life to generate money. Know your skill level. Know what you're capable of doing. For best success target the demographic around you as you'll know roughly their cyber security, knowledge, habits, etc. which you can leverage in your favor. The point is once you know what's possible and what you're able to do you can think begin to dip your fingers in a lot of pots to generate the most money within your skill level. The best advice I can give is look at the job postings for "ethical hacker" or "penetration tester". You'll notice the company requirements in order to get hired as such. The certifications they're looking for, experience, academics, etc. Take note of the certificates and look them up. If they're looking for Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) or CISSP, etc. Look up those certificates and take the courses, read the books, and pass the exams. Aim to educate yourself to the level of cyber security professional but aim your skill sets towards something more....profitable then a real job you see? Like many before me I met other hackers on IRC, forums, we hacked the planet, and developed professional relationship with. I was in a position to join a "hacking team" and receive requests to work for whatever client and whatever request. They're still very much active. No I won't say which firm because they wouldn't deal with any new clients. Specially ones from here. Money was good but you soon realize you're most likely working for other government entities and such. Meh. I run mostly solo because my motives differ from the hives mindset at the moment. Try and join CryptBB and go through their challenges needed to join their forums. Much respect for Power dealing with that soykaf. Places like that is where you meet "interesting" individuals. How many of those have you met here? It's difficult but I'm not here to network.

>>15917 Bump for being interesting.

>>16029 any sources on those sec guides?

>>16039 I mean it's kind of self explanatory lol.

>>16029 Recommending OpenBSD instead.

>>16028 >Was it a autoshop? I heard those exist for hackers to dump off credit cards Had nothing stolen, purely exploits, malware kits and other software toys with premium prices for zero days. Based it-sec lecturer was like "well you could work normal for bounties and you know how much they pay, now witness this places pricing and just to be clear im not advocating for you to use it of course. Just purely informational." >>16041 openbsd security guide for hardening is supposedly very useful but a lot to read. Its a full blown book and i never found the time to read through yet.

>>16047 In all honest it's autist-tier to suggest unless you're worried about a motivated, active global adversary.

>>16047 >>16048 All you need is a hardened linux distro with no systemd and a handful of VMs, like Whonix, Kali and Windows.

>>16049 And avoid using web browsers as much as humanly possible. https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.html >I used wget to download all 1,217 of the W3C specifications which have been published at the time of writing, of which web browsers need to implement a substantial subset in order to provide a modern web experience. I ran a word count on all of these specifications. How complex would you guess the web is? >The total word count of the W3C specification catalogue is 114 million words at the time of writing. If you added the combined word counts of the C11, C++17, UEFI, USB 3.2, and POSIX specifications, all 8,754 published RFCs, and the combined word counts of everything on Wikipedia’s list of longest novels, you would be 12 million words short of the W3C specifications. >Web browsers are responsible for more than 8,000 CVEs. A massive security risk.

>>16051 >>16048 >>16041 >>16047 Does anyone actually have any tips or knowledge?

>>16052 Yeah, I do. Make your (very consensual) bnet P2P, and implement some form of traffic mixing into your bots to increase the convenience of your anonymity.

>>16053 Any other tips for OPSEC and anonymity when starting out as a blackhat?

>>16052 People making money won't share because theres no benefit increasing competition. Public guides are generally written when money runs dry and publishing can give another boost bigger than keeping it secret. On the other front industry will tell you jobs are good just too flood the market with more supply than demand so that they can lowball salaries. Now i realize this aint helpful either but the tldr is you gotta dig for gold yourself if you wanna find anything valuable.

>>16061 This is absolutely fine, actually. During my struggle to become a programmer I realized that only entry level literature, tips, resources were really needed. Once you get in the mindset of programming and understand what it is all about, you begin to be able to figure the more advanced stuff out by yourself and if in doubt you know who to ask. The challenge is: where does one start with exploits? I have a very basic idea of how it works, but some applied examples and handholding would help. I think the best resource is to study existing exploits. There was a relevant git posted here. Now I am personally more interested in p2p and encryption tech, so more on the "hide your ass" side of things, but I believe there is some connection e.g.: >>16053

>>16061 depends on the country, my country is still like 20 years behind anything cyber sec related so its a good time to get into it and make bank