My name is Alexander Pick, I am a professional security researcher in the field of software, hardware, IoT, embedded and automotive security. If it comes to tech, I think I am a real freak. Like one of these people who can sit in front of something and tinker around with it until they discovered secrets. If needed for days or weeks. But don’t worry I am not socially disordered. I am married with a beautiful wife and have a amazing daughter who are my pride and joy.
I never wanted someone to call me a hacker, I felt bad being labeled as such. Mostly because I didn’t felt worthy to be compared to my idols I think. Today the label might fit, but it was a long way.
It started early
All started a long time ago, in the early 90s as I got my first computer. A C64, which was old by this time, but it opened me a world full of new possibilities. I instantly became hooked and started to investigate into this beautiful new world. What is BASIC, what can I do with it? Who made this interesting game intros with the weird music found on some discs I got from my friends?
A few year later, my younger me was hanging around on IRC and read fancy ezines and tuts delivered in .txt files. Inspired by these fancy tuts released by legends like +orc or fravia, I started to reverse engineer shareware games with SoftICE on my old MS-DOS computer. Information and good guidance was hard to come by and I really had to save up money for books or internet time (sorry, no flat rate in 1999!).
First Bugs
I started my first private security project “sentry-labs” in the spring of 2000. It was a lot of fun. I basically started bug hunting a long time before it was cool and submitted my finding to the security focus mailing list. There was no money involved or anything. If you ask me today why I started to search for security issues in software, honestly I have no real answer other than – it was interesting.
Recently I revived my old sentry-labs domain and put up a highscore-like table to display my very first CVEs from these days. Hey, I hold CVE 2001-1337, fear me! It is my little shrine for these fancy days. I love to remember these times. The internet was wild and free and I was young and foolish. 20 years later it is a great memory.
Bad Apples
Later – I think it was around 2010 – I joined the OSX and iPhone hacking community and helped out a bit where I could. This time will always be in my memory. I met so many great people and can still call some of them my friends, I loved this community and it was an amazing ride. You can still find my name documented in the acknowledgements (preface IX) of Jonathan Zdziarski’s book “iPhone Open Application Development” as a little leftover from these days.
After this time I continued to work in various other community projects, reaching from PS3 to 3D printing. In my professional carrier I worked my way all up to the CISO position. But management ate me up, so I returned to the position of a specialized security research expert and went into bug hunting. But here it starts to get boring somehow, I cannot go into details anyways. If you are interested in my professional carrier, feel free to check my profile on linkedin.
HAM!
Is there something else? I am also a HAM radio operator, licensed in Germany and the US. This hobby opened up a new playground to play and hack in. I love to build weird electronics, send data via HF or play with radios and modern SDRs. You won’t believe how happy I was to finally understand modulation and demodulation of signals after so many years.
I hope you like the website and contained information. Feel free to drop me a mail or comment if you like.
73 and happy hacking!
