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Kia ora/Hello/Talofa lava/Привет! I'm Riley. I'm an 18 year old person from New Zealand (🇳🇿). I'm fluent in English (🇬🇧), Русский (🇷🇺), Samoan (🇼🇸) and I am currently learning Afrikaans (🇿🇦) and Te Reo Māori (🇳🇿). I have a massive passion about all things infosec and compsci, but my hobbies and passions are quite diverse.


I am extremely interested in all aspects of cybersecurity and cyber defence. I have spent years studying how systems work and I've always had a lingering curiosity on how to break and manipulate them in unqiue ways. I have a wide background of practical application of my studying in both my work and personal projects. I love finding 0 days in enterprise software and IOT hardware and sharing the details of them with the wider infosec community, but I also have a large passion independent malware analysis and reverse engineering. I have documented numerous cases of credential stealers and DDoS botnets used in the wild and I find both analyzing threat intelligence and the process of reverse engineering and putting it into words to be extremely fascinating. But infosec is far from a one person job! It is absolutely fundamental in my beliefs and ethics that the tools to conduct and experiment with such research should be available to anyone with an interest in it. So I've spent a lot of time developing and maintaining open source tools that aids researchers in all aspects of reverse engineering and malware analysis. Infosec truly is a field full of utmost wonders and I am incredibly grateful to be a part of the community and contribute research, as well as learning from and assisting others to help and make the world a digitally safer place. And with a little bit of luck (and a few cans of Monster Energy), I hope to fully document and share my experiences and research here!


Another one of my big interests is thinking too much, but it's more commonly described as metaphysics by the masses haha. I heavily idolise philosophers like Schopenhauer for his concepts of collective idealism and Wittgenstein for being the founding father of our modern interpretation of phenomenology. Learning about different viewpoints and perspectives on how we approach issues is insanely interesting to me and it's something I love to research in my spare time. I also really like geography and political philosophy, they go hand-in-hand for the most part but learning about a countries/regions ethnic makeup, their political background and their history is something I find to be incredibly fascinating. I'm currently studying the foundations and subsequent aesthetic of esoteric accelerationism and how it plays into the modern radicalization of the alt-right. Personally though, my political beliefs can be loosely described as a strange hybrid of ethno-nationalism, anarchism and libertarianism, mixed with very liberal policies such as the need for acceptance and education of paraphilic relationships, the right for every individual to bear arms, the positive effects of cannabis and how we need to care more for our environment.


I am a major fan of alternative music and music theory. As an alternative producer myself, I am very opinionated and have deep perspectives on how music is made and how it reflects our emotions and moods. I listen to everything from obscure trance to early 2000's Algerian pop, to dariacore and Jersey club, to DSBM and indie black metal to my favorite genre, trashwave. Some of my favorite bands and artists include: Sadness, Life, Trhä, Apati, Xaev, Gladde Paling, Beansclub, AraabMuzik, Deadrazy, Boundbunny, Waqs, Death Grips, Zach Hill, Woods Of Ypres, Burzum, УННВ, Планка, Jedzen Egwiazd, Wilting, Life On Venus, My Bloody Valentine, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, S3RL, Егор Летов, Styles & Breeze, t.A.T.u., Paul Elstak and many many others. I also produce my own music under the aliases Untermensch and BONFANTE and I occasionally upload my DJ sets under my stage name irlshota.


I consider myself to be a political activist and hardline privacy advocate. I either donate to, volunteer with or actively support projects that help with everything from defending encryption and the right to privacy, to educating developers on the need for security, to safeguarding and protecting the rights of LGBTQ+ and paraphilic people. Some of these organizations include the Electronic Frontier Foundation, OWASP, Monero Project, Signal Foundation, DDoSecrets, Rainbow Youth Aotearoa, B4U-ACT, SPCA Aotearoa and Les Identitaires.


And that's pretty much all about me! Please stay tuned to this blog for all of my future articles and life updates.
Much love, Riley ❤️