Neil Barrett made his career break in Hong Kong with the help of the son of SATAN (Security Administrator Tool for Analysing Networks).
During an interval of a presentation given by Mr Barrett, the Australian head of an information technology company publicly accosted him. Handing Mr Barrett his business card, the bigwig challenged him to breach the sensitive file servers on which his multibillion-dollar trading business depended, then fetch and copy any secret and interesting files.
As a gamble, Mr Barrett accepted the challenge. He examined the company's website, then enlisted NMAP, the hard-to-detect successor of SATAN: a tool which can blow open each of the roughly 65,000 ports potentially accessible on a given computer. Thanks to NMAP, perseverance and some inspired poking around, Mr Barrett passed the penetration test.
Commenting on the significance of his initiation, Mr Barrett, 42, said that had he fouled it up, his firm, whose clients include top British companies, High Street banks, several police forces and major government departments, might not have developed at the speed it did.
'Having made a success of it, though, it opened up a large and interesting market for us. So, it was important, and could have been critical to us.'