Some people choose their careers; others stumble into them by accident. For Tunde (not his real name), the path to ethical hacking was the natural outcome of a restless mind, an unfair system, and years of trial-and-error in finding loopholes where others saw dead ends.
He wanted to win in a world that seemed wired against him. Along the way, he discovered that the same instincts that once drove him into hustles, spotting flaws, breaking processes, bending rules were the very instincts that could make him valuable in the digital world.
This is how he got there.
The First Breach
The story starts with disappointment. Tunde wasn’t exactly a brilliant student. His father promised to send whichever child had the best results abroad. Tunde worked harder than ever and emerged the clear winner, but through a crooked means. His school compiled the school results digitally. He was able to lay his hands on the file, and manipulated the results to his advantage.
But when it was time to deliver, his father chose his older brother instead.
“That broke me,” Tunde recalls. “I realised that life wasn’t a straight game of effort and reward. The system was rigged. And if the system can be rigged, then it can be hacked.”
It was his first breach trust. And it planted the seed of a philosophy: when rules fail you, find another way through.
The Beginning Of A The Hustler
After secondary school, he refused to be idle. In a bid to finesse his computer skills, he enrolled for computer classes. He started tinkering with the computer, and he realised that the result manipulation he did in secondary school can be classified as hacking. He read more about it, and started practicing with laptop at home.
“I was still feeling the adrenaline rush from manipulating results in secondary school, hacking became the path I wanted to tow, but I didn’t have money”
He started sharing what I was learning on Nairaland at the time, and soon he found online writing gigs that paid him N10,000 for five drafts.
“It wasn’t a lot of money, but I appreciated the fact that I earn online to supplement my learnings”
The money was small, but what mattered was independence. He was learning how to take skills, however basic, and translate them into value.
Then came the big discovery: crypto arbitrage. He figured out that you could buy bitcoin at the bank’s official rate, then sell at the black-market rate for a tidy profit.
“It was like discovering free money. A loophole hidden in plain sight.”
He borrowed from a friend with a hope of a huge cashout, but a friend stole it and elope with his girlfriend. It was his first real financial loss.
Instead of quitting, he adjusted. He built a team, and created a structured operation. At its peak, he and his partner were making up to ₦1m in profit monthly while in his first year in the University.
But systems always fight back. By 2022, banks shut down most naira card limits, and arbitrage collapsed. What looked like a permanent money machine was gone overnight.
From Hustling to Hacking
Losing arbitrage hurts. But it also opened a door to a new lifestyle, and when he lost the soure of income, he sought for another means, and decided to double down on hacking. As he learned, he stumbled onto online Capture The Flag (CTF) competitions, gamified challenges where players exploit software vulnerabilities, it felt familiar. Breaking them apart, but for practice, not profit.
“I realised this was the same thing I’d been doing my whole life, just in a more structured way. It wasn’t about shortcuts anymore. It was about mastery.”
Winning his first challenge, with a $200 prize, was like déjà vu. It wasn’t the money that mattered, but the validation: his way of seeing the world had a place, a purpose, and a name.
The transition wasn’t instant. He wrote articles, freelanced, even taught in training programs to pay the bills. But more and more, he gravitated toward hacking.
He devoured documentation, practised exploits for hours, and joined online communities of hackers trading tips. His wins multiplied. A hackathon gave him $2,000, which he blew on a MacBook, an iPhone, and gifts for family. He laughs now about how little of it was saved, but the prize mattered more than the spending: it told him he was good enough.
He started pitching to companies to test their systems, spot weaknesses, and help them defend against real threats, and gigs started rolling.
“In a bad month, I make $5K,”
In three years in the industry, Tunde has quietly built a financial base that many of his peers envy. He has about $20,000 spread across different investments, $5,000 tucked into mutual funds, and another $10,000 placed with a fintech platform yielding nearly 15% annually. But the numbers are only half the story.
His career opened doors to a new lifestyle: dinners in high-rise restaurants, late-night dates with women he met in different cities, each encounter shaping his outlook on love and relationships.
In 2024, Tunde made a bold move: he emigrated to Rwanda. Kigali’s calm energy and rising fintech ecosystem appealed to both his career goals and his desire for stability.
The Hacker’s Philosophy
Tunde is earning in dollars, working remotely, and enjoying the kind of financial freedom most of his peers could only dream about.
But beneath the gadgets, the trips, and the easy spending, there’s a philosophy that guides him: no system is flawless, failure is part of the hack, and breaking is building.
“To really understand a system, you must first know how to dismantle it,”
Now, Tunde wants to go beyond individual exploits. He dreams of building a hacker lab in Nigeria, a space where young people can learn to think critically, exploit vulnerabilities ethically, and defend systems before criminals get to them.
“The world will always have hackers,” he says. “The real question is: are you breaking to steal, or breaking to protect?”
For Tunde, the answer is clear. What once was survival is now purpose. And that’s how he landed here, an ethical hacker, forged by loopholes, betrayals, and the restless hunger to always see what’s beneath the surface.
I’ve lived many lives, but one lesson ties them all together: money is only as powerful as its utility. Through my work, I share stories about money and create guides for Africans who want to get the best out of theirs.