DC33 Creative Writing Contest Vegas Hackware The Wondering Raven's Manifesto Short story based on a real event. The year is 2000, this girl who is 20 at the time and we will call her Wondering Raven but online she was more known as Kallador, Excited to attend another year of Defcon as she was addicted to show up for the 3rd year of defcon, extremely filled with pride decided to made some graphics for Defcon 8 not just to show off the cringe worthy designs but also advertise their admin side of things as she was both Red and Blue team of 1, partnered with various different networks from the Digital Underground and Pranknet at the time. She hosted various domain names She worked day and night as she was poor, trying to make a name for herself but also trying her hardest not to get raided in the process. She created this hacker space online, called it WRnet, hacker inspired and with various partnerships with other networks, she was able to befriend so many different people. At this time, she was breaking into various computer networks from brazil, argentina, korea and other various out of the US places using remote execution on unpatched system to gain what is called "root shells" basically granting god like powers on a Linux machine most of these machines was Red Hat linux machines but she was also gaining powers as she was cracking into freebsd servers as well, she developed a script with a purpose of Denial of Service style attacks from using customized eggdrop bots. She was in love with this underground world, filled with pride and a high case of arrogance and lust with power. She still had a heart, when people needed help, she helped, when people needed stuff she secured them. Defcon 8 is here, she got up around 7am and got on her bicycle and rode from Bruce and Owens the border line that separated Las Vegas to North Las Vegas. She was driven and the need and desire to be one of the great ones and getting to Alexis park safely was the goal, she would just ride to the Hard Rock Casino and walk over though as she would figure it would be far less to get the bicycle stolen from there. She wasn't very social in real life only on the internet, so she basically acted like a ghost when it came to these events, she watched "Takedown" as a movie was being broadcasted there, listen to some talks on findings, but the key of the party was the music, it was like a big hacker festival. She did call out to others who said they were coming on the networks at the time the cross from WRnet, Dugnet, r00tabega, and pranknet (yes all 3 of these networks was a network together, but never could come to a solid name). But no one showed who did attended. The closing ceremony happened but she ended up leaving early because she rode her bicycle from the event to north las vegas all these few days, during these dog days of summer, but she grew up here, she was very used to this weather. Defcon was done but remember when I said she was with all the networks? these servers was not filled with white hat hackers, no they were filled with kids to young adults, with malicious intent and pride, extremely toxic and when pranknet really kicked it off with Skream9 at the time now known as Dex, she went from red team style to blue team to a point she was being DDoSed randomly, consistently getting hacking attempts she ends up splitting up from these networks as the DDoS was too much and since this server was running on the cable network at home she had no choice to. Slowly returning to a private hacker space, she redelivers her focus on dalnet with old friends and still being extremely arrogant still had random people picking fights with her because of it. Then one day she was in this hacker war with someone by the name of skrilla and noticed a familiar host in which she does the easiest thing she could have done and she hacked that host, a locally owned isp host. She not only took it over she patched the network, booted skrilla out and anyone else that would have rootkit the network. She for the fun and setting the stage for what happens next she targets the mail server and formats it rm -fr / * A few weeks later she ended up working for that ISP but that ISP promised her so much just to come work for her for food technically to start and pay her parents bills Fast forward to today 2025 preparing for DC33 her story in hand just can't wait to sit around and tell people again, during them years she was promised to be a partner for that ISP, that ISP owner ended up robbing her identity, stealing over 50k from her and ruining her credit in the process. She wrote a story and upon this story, it was used in a court battle and helped place that ISP owner for fraud. On top of the long hard road, today she hacks for good. Uses the knowledge learned to better everyone around her and teaches the next generation on the importance of cyber security. While she always wanted to be known as one of the great ones, never really knew she was one of the great ones, she hacked with YTcracker, Jaynus from Global hell, Pirated with Avec from Razor 1911 before Operation buccaneer and in the end she helped take down a big fraud, the Owner of the ISP. In this world she is a hacker, she is a drifter, she is the conqueror of cancer, the savor of networks. Yes this is a world she is both a ghost but also a great one, an unsung lone cyber warrior. The Wondering Raven.