About The $100 Hacker

Why The $100 Hacker Exists

The library on this site comes from more than two years of writing — lunch breaks, late nights, weekends. I put that time in because of what I have lived, and because I am a father who understands the need to protect his family.

Any parent knows this: the first time you hold your child, something in you changes. You realize there is no distance you would not travel to keep them safe from the things in this world that hunt the unprepared. That is part of why these books exist. It is not the whole reason.

I have had my identity stolen. I watched a bank account get emptied and lived the painful and terrifying moments of trying to figure out how to feed my kid one more meal while fighting a years-long battle to recover what was taken. Those days stay with you. They force a choice: claw your way back and hope it never happens again or take the fight to them by learning the skills required to combat those who would harm you. I chose to fight. I threw myself into the work that makes most people’s eyes glaze over — phones, Wi-Fi, networks, Bluetooth, and the quiet ways a device talks and betrays you. Believe me, my eyes glazed over too, many times. I did it anyway. I refused to remain an easy target to hit if I could close the door on them.

Who I am

Collin - The $100 Hacker

Father. U.S. Navy veteran. Former police officer in Wallis, Texas.

IT operations and support for NASA, Boeing, Dell, Houston Methodist, and Shell — the world’s largest corporate energy trader.

Protector by nature, not by slogan. Every page here is something I have used or lived.

Where this started

When I was eight, I found myself the target of a predator. I was abducted and molested. In broad daylight I was grabbed off the road and began the most terrifying moments of my life. I am fifty-one now. I served in the military during wartime, and I have stared down a pistol in the hands of someone I had to arrest. I have walked into the hallway and heard a strange male voice coming from my six-year-old son’s room. I know fear. I know the stress of life-and-death decisions. I am here to tell you this, nothing in those years has matched the terror of that day, or the pain that followed. That pain never goes away; you just learn to live with it. I still remember it several times a month and every time is filled with echoes of a child’s terror born of powerlessness. In my experience, a person has a choice to make on the other side of any of these events. They can either choose to try and hide, or they can do what I did. I decided to use it as fuel.

Before that day I had the same kind of childhood a lot of us had — I played outside until the streetlights came on, I drank water from the hose, bike rides were measured in daylight left. There were threats around us that we were not aware of but it was very different. We did not carry the source of danger in our pockets like kids today do.

Kids today live a large part of their lives in rooms we cannot see; virtual ones. They make friends, build communities, and sometimes lead a completely separate and second life online that does not look anything like the one we see at the dinner table. Parents rarely know how exposed those rooms and every kid in them are — not because we do not care, but because we never lived there and we don’t understand it all.

The kind of person who hurt me learned a new set of skills to be able to do it. That predator still exists today but they have gone high-tech. Their goal is the same: gain the trust of an innocent child, isolate them, then exploit them. They do not kick in doors. They do not snatch kids off the street first like they did me. They show up in chat rooms and games as friends. They ask questions that sound harmless — where do you live, what school, are you home alone, what do your parents do, are they at work right now? If another child asked these questions, no one would blink an eye. For a predator these questions serve a very specific purpose. They are reconnaissance. They collect as much information as possible, until they have the leverage they need. Then the mask comes off and that friendship ends and your child’s worst nightmare begins. Sometimes those kids stay silent, falling into depression, substance abuse and internal humiliation. Sometimes it becomes the parent’s worst nightmare when they wake up and find their child is not in bed or in the living room watching TV. Too many of those kids never come home. I wrote these books, checklists and worksheets to help keep families from ever having to suffer through these hellscapes. I wrote it to help you protect yourself and your families.

The same patterns show up at work, different approaches, different end goals, but the same pattern. They get a foot in the door by sounding like someone you should trust. That often is the access. Then they are gone.

 Different room. Different motivation. Different end goals. Same hunt.

I have spent years learning how to close the easy doors attackers use to get to you, your kids and your company — on phones, on networks, and in the conversations most families avoid. I also learned the limits of what is possible. I have worked to help make you safer but I will not dress it up or lie to you. I will never be completely safe. Neither will my son. Neither will you. You need to know the settings to change, the doors to close, the places where the threats hide and wait and you need the trust. Your kids need it all as well, but without the stress of watching for it.

That is what you will find in these books and in The Watch Desk: real steps, real conversations, real defenses, current and new risks and threats to our identity and security online. How to talk to your kids honestly without pushing them into secrecy. How to raise the cost of attacking a home or a device high enough that most opportunists move on and find an easier target.

I do not want another child — or another family — to live what mine lived. I do not want a parent finding out too late that the “friend” in their child’s game was never a friend, but a monster hiding behind a screen. Every page comes from that place of protection.

My promise is simple. I will not publish a word I have not used. I will never be anything but honest and direct. And I will never confuse you with technical terminology and acronyms you need to research for an hour before understanding.

You and I may never meet. We may never become friends or share a cup of coffee. That is okay. I will still be in the background giving you the information and tools you need to protect the digital life of your house and the trust inside it. I will help you protect your job by helping you use work devices on your home network or your personal devices on a corporate or guest network. My whole job is to empower you to protect yourself, your family and your career in a world that most people have heard of but never understood.

Unfortunately, none of us can fix everything. We cannot lock every door to every threat, but together we can build a defensive front that makes the next hunter keep moving down the road in search of an easier target.

That’s it. That is who I am and why I built and wrote all of this in a nutshell.

If you have read all the way to this point allow me to be the first to say this.

Welcome to The $100 Hacker.

Collin McKnight
The $100 Hacker