Marcus Vnz

During that time I started creating cheats for Transformice and sharing them with other players.

The more I explored the scripts, the more I wanted to understand how the client worked.

How the game behaved internally. How scripts interacted with it. How programs executed code on a system.

Eventually I started experimenting with embedding extra behavior inside the cheats I distributed.

People downloaded the cheats expecting only the functionality they were told about.

But the programs also executed additional payloads/trojans.

Through that I managed to access their PC's.

Today I look back at that phase very differently.

It’s not something I’m proud of.

But it was a brutal introduction to a very real lesson:

most people blindly trust software they download.

After a while Transformice stopped being interesting.

Minecraft servers were exploding in popularity, and thousands of community servers existed.

Most of them were run by small groups with little knowledge about infrastructure or security.

Together with a friend we started exploring how those servers worked.

Plugins.

Permissions.

Administration systems.

Configurations.

A surprising number of servers were extremely vulnerable simply because they were badly configured.

Many had permission systems that could be manipulated or plugins that allowed privilege escalation.

For fun we would explore those weaknesses and sometimes end up with administrative roles inside servers.

It was chaotic, stupid, and honestly hilarious at the time.

But it also exposed me to something important:

systems are rarely broken because of complex exploits.

Most of the time they break because of human mistakes and poor configuration.

Around that same time my curiosity expanded beyond games.

I became interested in networks.

Infrastructure.

And how systems behaved under stress.

I began experimenting with how online services reacted when they received unexpected traffic.

That curiosity eventually escalated into larger experiments.

At one point I attempted something that could be considered close to a large-scale DDoS event (And of course, I'm not going to mention the servers).

Not something I look back on proudly.

But those experiences forced me to learn a lot about infrastructure limits, network behavior, and system resilience.

Between 2019 and 2020 I became involved with a group of hackers.

During that time we participated in coordinated attacks against servers and websites belonging to public institutions in Brazil.

Looking back now, that phase of my life was chaotic.

A lot of curiosity, very little maturity, and a huge amount of experimentation.

But it exposed me to things most developers never see so early:

• reconnaissance • infrastructure attacks • coordinated operations • weaknesses in real-world systems

Eventually something changed.

Instead of asking:

"how can I break this?"

I started asking:

"how does this actually work?"

That question changed everything.

My curiosity shifted from breaking systems to understanding them.

From exploitation to analysis.

From chaos to engineering.

That’s when cybersecurity and reverse engineering became the direction I truly wanted to pursue.