Welcome
Hi there, I am Andrew Bornt, but I go by Drew. I am currently a Senior Systems Engineer, though I have a background in Incident Response and Disaster Recovery. I also like to write fantasy and design and develop video games. While I don’t have any published works (yet), I have written a lot of short stories and done a lot of game design in my own personal time.
Socials
Occasionally, I’ll post about something I’m working on on these:
IT
In 2020, just before covid ended the world as we knew it, I was hired on as an IT help desk technician for a small MSP. Through thorough notetaking and a painstaking number of questions… and a little necessity of the business, I was eventually overlooking multiple client sites with some project guidance from my boss. However, after about just a year’s time, I was installing firewalls, switches, rack mounting servers, and deploying entire Active Directory environments by myself and helping train new hires on these things. Toward the end of 2022, in October, I was hired on as an Incident Response Engineer for a company that specialized in recovering from ransomware events. I was brought in at the lowest rung of the totem pole, but promoted in under a year. In late 2024, I could see the writing on the wall for the company and while that company hasn’t gone out of business at the time of writing, I know that a large number of people I worked with there also no longer work there. I have since taken a position as a Senior Systems Engineer in October of 2024. Rather than working 60-80 hours a week, helping companies rebuild their virtual infrastructure, restore their servers, and cleanse and rebuild their AD environments, I am now back to working MSP projects, just on a larger and more focused scale than before.
While I have professionally developed a lot of strong skills with Active Directory, Windows, Linux, Firewalls (and other networking equipment), I have been learning white hat hacking, red teaming, and penetration testing. All KIND of names for the same thing, though I’ll leave the nuances for others to be angry about me calling them the same. Let me tell you, there is nothing more humbling than working on developing these sorts of skills and then going to an “easy” machine on HackTheBox and it feeling like you ran into a brick wall. There’s a reason my main HTB write-ups on here are for Active Directory related machines.
Game Design and Development
I’ve played video games since I was able to play on my neighbor’s Nintendo 64 as a child. As a teenager, I wanted to make a living as a video game developer, but access to materials teaching how to make video games were lacking, and those that were available were too complex for my younger self. I’ll admit that most of it would still probably make me scratch my head. Since then, in 2019 I was introduced to Unity and the ease and accessibility to learning materials had me diving in head first. I spent countless hours every night for weeks on end learning. From making a simple screen tap game that changed the direction a ball was rolling so it would stay on platforms that would infinitely generate to developing a multi-level 2D side scroller in the style of Castlevania or Metroid. The first big 3D game I started to work on had me delving into learning how to create an inventory system (with scriptable objects and much more complex logic than I expected for moving items around inventory slots), a save system that tracked the player’s inventory, the inventory of containers around the world, the player’s position, and a handful of other stats, and a farming system for tilling, watering, planting seeds, and harvesting the completed crops.
After learning the hard way about making external backups of my data, I have lost the original source code to those projects. I have sense dabbled with terrain generation, Inverse Kinematics, and combining multiple pre-made assets from the Unity Asset store into a cohesive system for the building blocks of an open-world game. I have a lot of video game projects I would love to start working on, but only limited time along with many other hobbies. Below, I’ll have some of the small projects I have worked on and self-published.
https://mrfoxmangaming.itch.io/desktop-dragon-pet
Writing
I have always loved the Fantasy and Science Fiction genres: Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Doctor Who, Star Wars… most any popular media within these genres over the last 30 years. My short stories have involved a castle siege, the clashing of dragons, and hero vs villain power struggles. I am currently working on a longer story involving magic and the modern day, less Harry Potter and more Dresden Files (without the creepy sexualization of every female character) meets Supernatural… I might adjust this description as I write more.
I am also a fan of The Phoenix Project and other works like Project Zero Trust. I have been working on outlining a similar book that details the events of an disaster recovery event that is very likened to something I’ve experienced before as an incident response engineer.
This has also led me to want to write a book on Incident Response, or at least the Recovery portion of it, as well as a book on designing and implementing secure systems in an environment.
Once I have a repository for any short stories I feel like making public, I will link that here.
Other Stuff
You may be interested in my Zero To IT with THM page where I have links to Tryhackme rooms and wrote out a beginners guide to getting started with IT using free resources.
Handy Links
Pentesting Strategies Useful Pentest Tools and Services
This website is made possible through Quartz, Github Pages, and Obsidian. If you’re interested in starting your own, I recommend Nicole’s Video Here.