Dan Rearden

Bio

Hiya everyone! I’m Dan Rearden, aka HaircutFish. My journey into the world of IT started unexpectedly at the start of 2020 with a knee injury. That left me in a career quandary, as I wasn’t able to return to my previous employment. Finding myself with some unexpected downtime, I decided to plunge headfirst into studying IT. Building my first PC and installing
Windows opened up a whole new world, especially when I discovered the magic of VMs and started exploring Linux. Honestly, the more I learned, the more captivated I became. It felt like stepping onto a path that kept branching off into equally interesting directions. My ADHD
absolutely thrives on that kind of exploration!

One of those branches led me to a small computer and mobile repair shop, where I got hands-on experience tearing down and fixing all sorts of tech. Eventually, another fork in the road appeared: should I deepen my repair skills or explore something new? Hacking caught my eye, and I was instantly hooked. For me, it’s all about the thrill of solving puzzles, and cybersecurity is just one giant, intricate puzzle.

Fast forward to today, and that hacking path presented me with another exciting choice: Red Team or Blue Team? Blue Team resonated more with who I am, so I chose Blue Team. All that dedicated learning, especially in the realm of Blue Team tactics, brought me to my current position at ProCircular where I triage tickets daily, as I work towards becoming a detection engineer.