visitor@thefish.nz:~$ man jason_

man jason_

NAME

Jason Hill

ALIASES

Oscar Fish, OscarThePhish

LOCATION

Auckland, New Zealand

DESCRIPTION

My relationship with computers started in the 1980s with a second-hand Commodore 64 my parents bought me.

I spent hundreds of hours in front of it playing games, experimenting with BASIC and trying to understand how things worked.

The games themselves were laughably simple by any modern standard. A handful of colours, blocky sprites, sound effects that were really just the sound chip doing its best impression of an explosion. None of that mattered. A few dozen pixels were enough to build an entire world in your head, and having to fill in the rest yourself somehow made the imagination work harder, not less.

A bit later came dial-up bulletin boards, which came with their own tax on the household. Getting online meant tying up the one phone line in the house, and everybody knew exactly what that shrieking modem handshake meant: don't touch the phone. Someone inevitably would anyway, picking up an extension somewhere else in the house to make a call, and the whole connection would die instantly, mid-download, mid-conversation, mid-everything. There's a very particular kind of frustration reserved for losing a file at ninety-four percent because someone needed to ring their friend.

I can still hear the 8-bit loading music.

A few things have changed since then.

These days my professional background is in IT and cyber security, with much of my recent experience centred around security operations.

I've worked across incident investigation and triage, endpoint and network security, phishing and email analysis, vulnerability management, SIEM, threat research and the wonderfully broad discipline of figuring out why something doesn't look quite right.

The part of the security world I keep gravitating back towards is OSINT.

I like investigations where the answer isn't handed to you.

Finding fragments of information. Working out which ones matter. Cross-referencing sources. Following small clues across completely different places and gradually turning them into something useful.

I'm particularly interested in open-source intelligence, digital investigations, threat intelligence, external exposure and the point where the online world intersects with the physical one.

That intersection extends to physical security as well. Lock picking, bypass techniques and understanding how physical access controls actually fail appeal to the same part of my brain as OSINT does. It's the same underlying question of how something is supposed to work versus how it actually behaves under scrutiny.

Tools are useful, and I use plenty of them, but I'm a big believer in understanding the investigation rather than simply knowing which button to press.

Give me a browser, a few clues and an unreasonable number of tabs and I'm generally quite happy.

CTFs and OSINT challenges tap into the same instinct. They force you to think differently, work with incomplete information and decide when a lead is worth pursuing and when you're disappearing down the wrong rabbit hole.

I'm still constantly learning.

Cyber security has a convenient habit of making sure that's unavoidable.

PURPOSE

This site is my bucket of ones and zeros.

It's somewhere to document investigations, CTF write-ups, techniques, tools, experiments and things I've learned along the way.

Partly in the hope they might be useful to somebody else.

Mostly because there's a good chance future me will have completely forgotten how I did it.

CURRENT INTERESTS

  • Open-source intelligence
  • Digital investigations
  • Security operations
  • Threat intelligence
  • External exposure and attack surface research
  • Vulnerability analysis
  • Phishing and email investigation
  • Physical security, lock picking and bypass techniques
  • CTFs and investigative challenges

BUGS

Known issues include:

  • Opening far too many browser tabs.
  • Turning a five-minute question into a three-hour investigation.
  • Refusing to believe there isn't one more useful search term.
  • Occasionally getting distracted by pizza.

STATUS

Still curious.

Still learning.

Still digging.

Enjoy.

pizza party time

CONTACT

LinkedIn Jason Hill

Email oscarthephish@gmail.com

Other places @OscarThePhish ยท GitHub