Liam Follin - How to get away with hacking
Presenters detail vulnerability discovery and exploitation in Liam Follin - How to get away with hacking.
Summary
Personal Journey
KPMG lead pentester Liam Follin recounts moving from martial arts instructor and Costa barista to CHECK team leader, framing the talk as practical guidance for breaking into penetration testing rather than elite CTF gatekeeping.
Technical Foundations (Without Elitism)
He recommends OverTheWire Bandit, basic coding, TryHackMe or Hack The Box, and PortSwigger for app testing—not to top leaderboards but to pass hiring CTFs. He demos turning a reflected XSS blocked by JSON encoding into cookie theft using JavaScript string.fromCharCode and jQuery callbacks.
Non-Technical Essentials
Follin stresses meticulous note-taking (Obsidian linked to GitHub), conference networking that led to his KPMG role, and accepting that pentesting involves travel, exams (CHECK, CSTL, CBEST), extensive reporting, and continuous learning across ever-growing tech stacks.
Industry Realities
Entry is competitive—seventy applicants in days for one junior role—and success requires sustained effort beyond nine-to-five, but specialization beats pretending to master every domain.
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