Competitions and development
I won a district programming competition at the age of 11 and later studied software development. During high school I was already testing system boundaries, with much less awareness than today.
About
Who am I, and how did I become an ethical hacker?
I am Csermák Szabolcs. The professional path behind WebShield did not start with one course. It started with years of programming, system operation, mistakes, incidents and the realization that security cannot be glued onto a system afterwards.
The first steps
The story started long before today's web security problems.
Commodore 64 and BASIC
As a child I wanted to become an astronomer, then around 1989 a Commodore 64 arrived at home. Games, BASIC books and my first programs quickly took over.
Curiosity led me from using the machine to understanding what happened behind the scenes.
The first hacking mindset
A C64 cartridge made it possible to stop games and inspect memory. That was my first encounter with a way of thinking that later became essential in ethical hacking: understand how a system works, then find its weak points.
From programming to security thinking
A programming background became an important foundation, but a few hard lessons were needed for the security mindset.
Hosting services
In the early 2000s I developed PHP-based webshops and also worked with hosting. At the time it was easy to believe that if something worked, it was also secure.
The first serious incident
One morning several clients called because their websites had been defaced. Backups helped restore quickly, but the lesson was clear: backup is not protection, only the last handhold.
Why ethical hacking?
A security test from an outsider's perspective showed how many invisible weak points a system can have.
Around 2005, a friend working in IT security tested our server: Zoli Pánczél, one of the founders of Silent Signal. The result was sobering: he found attackable points almost everywhere.
From that point on I started learning how attackers think. It is not enough to look at a website as a developer; you also have to examine it as an attacker would. This mindset later became the foundation of WebShield.
My earlier public vulnerability disclosures include CVE-2017-14320 and CVE-2017-14321.
Today the goal is not firefighting after the fact, but early vulnerability detection, reliable backups, control and fast expert intervention when WordPress sites are at risk.
If your website security matters, let's talk
We can help with preventive WebShield protection and hacked WordPress recovery.