Hacker News Reader

Comment by cyberlab | Hacker News Reader

This is a form of blue team hacking, and instead of doing offense, you are doing defense. It's worth remembering how it can all come crumbling down due to bad OPSEC. Read this for more information: https://blogsofwar.com/hacker-opsec-with-the-grugq/

The covert lifestyle can be mentally taxing, and you will make mistakes (if you're not consistently careful). Here's a good quote from that Grugq article:

    As I phrased it in my “The Ten Hack Commandments” — be proactively paranoid, it doesn’t work retroactively.

View on HN

The covert lifestyle can be mentally taxing, and you will make mistakes (if you're not consistently careful).

Catch the flu or a cold, get shorted on sleep for one or more nights or have one distracted moment for any random reason and that can make the whole thing fall apart. People seem to vastly underestimate this reality.

Also: In practice, people who are in earnest on the run are often identified based on things like subscribing to their favorite magazines related to their hobby.

I think for most people that's the harder thing to address: How do you just stop being yourself and develop entirely new interests?

Trying to just not do X because it's closely associated with who you are is amazingly hard and can rapidly start making people actually crazy. This is much harder to do than breaking a bad habit which is infamously hard for most people under the best of circumstances.

>How do you just stop being yourself and develop entirely new interests?

Furthermore, no contact with people from prior life. Access to healthcare. Access to money if you didn't take a big pile out (and then where do you keep it?) Where do you live without a bank account? Driving is a big risk. The list goes on.

> I think for most people that's the harder thing to address: How do you just stop being yourself and develop entirely new interests?

But why? There's countless people that enjoy the same things you do. Unless you're into very niche activities, it should dilute in the noise. Maybe drop the least popular activities/subscriptions/toys?

I read an article on people who work for life insurance companies that track down “missing presumed dead” people. The most common trip up was that they did not fully cut ties from their old life. Including friends, family, and hobbies and such.

You’d be surprised.

Anyone have the link? I can’t seem to find it.

There are lots of people who like cars, and lots of people who like avocados, and lots of people in your ZIP code, but the intersection of those sets is... you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com