barnseyboy@cyberarmy

Cyberarmy was recommended to me by a friend pertinax who I had previously worked with, but had subsequently moved back to the states. We had always had an interest in IT security and had spend some of our time together fiddling with the old company network and running l0pthcrack over it. Fortunately at the time we were both being paid as 'security proffesionals' so there was no chance of geting into trouble. I had just moved back to my home town, and taken up a new job in a pokey office pretty much to myself.

It was the summer of 2001, and like most members joining around that time I was instantly hooked on zebulun and forums. I made a lot of friends with ppl going through the ranks at the time including (but not limited to) reef, hellz, gabanna, chawmp, boefe, sefo, ion6ix, Chi, redeemer, snarkles, s0LaRiS, sieco, wang, keoki, craytonic, k_phactor, Pandect, d-cypell, aton, xenic, booto, shn, w0lf, fugjostle, deepthought, axem, eidolon and spent far too much on irc especially the #cyberarmy and #ltkernel channels.

As most of the time was spent doing the challenges and pwning newbs I have included a few miscellaneous challenge related artefacts which for one reason or another were sat on this computer, such as... My original .su proxy list (thanks proxyhunter). A copy of the fing0r which I seem to remember finding personally very satisfying.

My memory becomes a little clouded, and im not sure exactly which challenge this password came from but I remember thinking it was really cool after I decrypted it. After completing one of the challenges I remember being completely suckered by a bogus email which I thought had come from pengo but had infact come from ciri. I remember feeling such a fool at the time as I had fallen for it hook line and sinker. As soon as I realised I told wa1800z, who I dont think has forgiven me to this day ;-) He blocked a huge range of .su's which were in a list I had divulged. A valuable lesson learned in social engineering (thanks ciri) and I guess from that point onwards the famous .su challenge got even more impossible!

As I remember it was everyones duty who passed the final challenge to immediately go and get a copy of the site and challenge source code but I think its since been made public.

I thought I would mention a few of the people (for which I have some crap left on my disk) that I have spent more than a few hours online with. The only problem with that is of course you forget all the old faces and only remember only the current, but these few have been there for most of the time! My good friend think12 who loved to keep his identity somewhat anonymous, so that really makes it my duty to include a nice picture of him here. A long time back we played about with some grand designs of writing a hacking based rpg and for some reason I still have the schema.

Of course after completing the challenges most of my time was spent at osi and most of the people I met there have gone on to become trusted friends, especially people like elybis who is responsible for creating most of the backbone of the site. Thankfully the site got a rewrite after being hacked a few too many times.

Some others I happen to have incriminating photgraphs of, such as Aton who deserves a mention as the owner of the osix.net domain name, always a good friend and holder of trusted opinion.

I was always pretty sceptical about people who go 'Ret.' at cyberarmy, because after all its just a website, you shouldnt need to go Ret you should just stop logging in! There is just something unexplainable the place - I mean what other site has a Retired status! Of course i'll always be administrating at osi but this page marks the time at which my illustrious rise the cyberarmy ranks came to an end.