Thank you very much for joining us today here at Channel 17, and today we have great, wonderful guests. One of them, no one can introduce him anymore. His name is Mohammed Jafar, and the other one is an incredible community-minded, oriented person. His name is Lal Pradham. And as you probably know, today is the remembrance of the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Day. But we are here to talk about two main items. One of them is a non-citizen voting ballot item that will come through the voters of Burlington. And also we have a great, wonderful event called New American Voting Event coming up. So without further ado, we will let our guests to introduce themselves. So can we start with you, sir? Hello. Thank you again for having me. My name is Mohammed Jafar. I am currently working for the Burlington Community Justice Center as a Tamarican Pre-Trial Services Coordinator. I am involved in the community, and I am a longtime Burlington resident originally from Kenya. And thank you, Ali, for having me here. My name is Lal Pradham. I am one of the, you know, the people, the citizen here just recently. And I work as a liaison in the district, Burlington School District. Burlington School District multi-lingual liaison. And also we have a community organizer, and you work for the Peace and Justice Center? Burlington Justice Center. That's great and wonderful. Thank you both for joining us here today. So as we talked about earlier, today is the legacy of, the remembrance of the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Day, a civil right movement who had thought increasingly and all the time for equality, for justice, for equal pay, and for just the well-being of everyone living in the United States of America and beyond. He fought against war. He thought for the pay, you know, for people to organize. He was really, he left us at a very young age. And it seems today if he lived, he would have been 92 or 93 years old. So to my guess, what do you think, what does this day mean for you? And what do you think is happening in Burlington around this day? To me, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is a legacy. Individuals like him throughout history create doors for people who are faced with nothing but walls. And to me, thinking about where I am today and what I'm capable of doing and where I'm seated in this very moment, I'm humbled and always reminded that there are people who have sacrificed a lot to create the space that I'm able to now inhabit and kind of accept and take in. So to me, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is a door opener. He is a door opener, a hero. Someone who inspired all of us as, you know, immigrants and refugees. And Mr. Lal, what would you want to add to that? So yeah, he's a legendary person, you know, who always fought for the rights of the people. And he always, you know, showed his bravery and then protected the rights of the people who always fought for the rights of the people. Wonderful, wonderful. So it seems there are so many great, wonderful people who are trying to follow his footsteps for justice, for equality, for equity. And one of them is my guest and one of them is Mohammed Jafar, who has been working tirelessly for equity in this community. As you probably know, he has a great, wonderful event coming up that will be helping new Americans to really get involved deeply in a very, very deep sense. So Mohammed, can you tell us what is this new American voting event coming up? So the new American voting event is a leg of a three-piece project that myself and a small group of community leaders have been working on for over a year. This project first originated back during the November elections last year of 2018. A few Somali women who recognized me came up to me. I serve on the board for the registration of voters and they were excited to vote, but they felt like they didn't really know how and they didn't have enough information to kind of navigate the polling station. That was both frustrating and exciting at the same time because I was really excited that they were there and they were excited by the opportunity to vote and they wanted to be involved. But at the same time it was a little bit frustrating that they didn't have enough resources to actually find their way to our democracy. And hearing other people kind of make the same concern, I reached out to the Secretary of State's office. I drove out to Montpelier Met with them several times and I brought a team together and we came up with this project, this three-piece project that consists of videos that have been translated or not translated videos that have been acted out of people voting, the voting process. And then we have voiceovers of them in six languages as it was shown. We had originally asked for five languages. We got six languages, which is excellent. Along with those videos we've got the both municipal and state ballots translated for both Burlington and Winooski as well, where the municipal ballots are translated as well. And then the third piece is this event, which is going to be providing this new resource and this information to folks. We have childcare. We have food from Kismayo Kitchen and Nepali Kitchen. We've got speakers, tremendous volunteers and community members who are hoping to gather together and kind of bring people to the table. You know, voting is a sacred thing, but there are some people, some of us come from communities and places around the world where voting is something that could really cost us a lot more than... A lot more than other people would think. So, you know, it's important to give people the opportunity to be a part of their own lives and to make decisions and vote on who represents them. Absolutely.  How old were you when you first came here in the United States? So I was seven years old when I first came here. So you are a product of the Burlington School District? Absolutely. And you graduated high school and you went over for college. Yep, I went to New Hampshire for college. You came back. And returned, yep. So when you returned, you noticed that there was an issue and the issue was the new Americans were really left out in participating meaningfully in our democracy. Absolutely. And then it seems you went to the Secretary of State's office, you met with them several times and to come up with this great, wonderful idea. Absolutely. And so if you can tell us, so there are six languages where the ballot items in both Winooski and Burlington will be translated on Town Meeting Day. That's great. And also you're saying there is a video demonstration on how people can vote. And there is an event where you will show that video that you worked very hard with those community-minded folks. And also, would there be registration processes? Oh, yes. So during the event, there will be stations for people to register. People will get information on how to vote. There will be mock voting. You can pretend to vote. You'll have all the videos playing in a loop around the space. All the actors were new Americans and community members. And we got all kinds of people in the videos. And so it's an inclusive project and it's a project really meant to make people excited about this right and privilege that we have. Absolutely. Absolutely. And also I think we're talking about citizens, I mean new Americans who are legal citizens of the United States. They can show up to that event and now they can show up to the voting booths and vote meaningfully with really a lot of confidence about who they're voting for and what they're voting about. Yes. And the best part is even if you're not a United States citizen, if you're going to be a United States citizen and you're thinking about wanting to vote now is a good time to get that education so that when you are a citizen, you're able to jump right in it and be a part of the process. So that's the best part about it is now is a good time to learn and people now have the ability to get that education at this event. This is so great. So wonderful. Thank you so much for your leadership boss. Thank you. So now are you a citizen of the United States? Yes. Just recently in November, this past November, I got the citizenship. I'm very super excited, you know, and in my entire life, I haven't voted. I haven't participated in voting. So it's super exciting event that I will be participating in where I will be just, you know, practically going through, you know, voting during the voting. So that gives me idea of how to vote and that would be my first experience how to vote in our democracy here. So great. So wonderful. I mean, I think you can give Mohammed a high five. Thank you for helping us. Thank you for organizing this event. You know, it's very important for the new Americans, especially because many of the people they have never voted. Even my parents, I can just, you know, I can just imagine that how exciting would they be to learn how to vote because they have never voted in their life. I don't remember back in our country voting and in the refugee camp, you know, there was no such voting in the democratic system or whatever was there. And coming to this country, you know, and struggling to get the citizenship and then that's the basic right of the citizens to vote and people would be super excited to vote. Super excited. This is so great. And also it has some, I almost want to, I almost have tears that you'll be voting for you for the first time with your parents. Exactly. Oh my, this is great. And also before you vote, Mohammed, can you tell us when is the events? It seems we're not talking about one, but there are a couple. Yes. So there are two events. One event is on Saturday, January 25th. So this Saturday coming up from two to four o'clock. Again, we will have food. We will have speakers. We will have childcare. Come, come enjoy. We will have interpretation as well. The second event is in Winooski, also same thing. We will have Kismai Kitchen, Nepali Kitchen, childcare and interpretation. Excellent food, excellent childcare, excellent interpretation services. That's so great. And that'll be at the O'Brien Center, 32 Mallets Bay Avenue, Winooski. That'll be Saturday, February 8th from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. So join us. The speakers will include Secretary of State Jim Condos, Hal Colston, Amila Merzanovich, sorry, Ali Jang and Mohammed Jafar. And speakers will flip-flop between the two events. But you will hear from each person at one or the other. Absolutely. So, I mean, it seems everyone know who is the Secretary of State. But who is Hal and Amila Mir Darovovich? What are they? What are they all in the community? So, Hal is a community leader as well. And I believe a state representative, yeah. And then Amila is the Director, actually, of United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, formerly known as the Refugee Resettlement Program. And so she's, of course, involved in the immigration process that is kind of a mess right now and that. So, and then Mr. Ali Jang is, of course, our City Councilor from Burlington. Ward 8, 7. I missed it. Ward 7. And then Mr. Mohammed Jafar, that's me, just community organizer. Absolutely. And maybe you don't have it on top of your mind. But roughly, how many meetings from the time you went to see the Secretary of State to this event? How many meetings do you think you have done with people to sell this idea? To facilitate this? Yes, yes. To be honest, the amount of meetings and the amount of, like, attempted meetings and missed meetings and the amount of different people that jumped on board for the project and then dropped out and the amount of people that came on and then stayed and then were gone again, I don't even think I can come up with a number for you. I almost felt like a consultant at some point. I was thinking I should try to do this for a living. And it took you then more than a year when this idea come to you precisely? I think around, maybe I started meeting with the Secretary's office in January of last year. So around about a year I would say. I think November was kind of when everything happened and then there was some outcry and here and there there would be a month where there would be a home because things would be busy whether there's the legislation session or the legislature is in session, sorry, or I'm busy but otherwise. Great, great. This is amazing. As you all heard, it will be Saturdays at 25th at 2 p.m. in Burlington AALV, also known at 20 Allen Street, one community center. And the second one is in Winiski, O'Brien Community Center, Malets Bay Avenue and it will be Saturday, February 8th from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and I like how you guys did it one is in the afternoon and the other one is at the end of the day in the morning. This is great, this is incredible. But Mohammed, how was it like? Did you get some buy-in or some push-back from the secretary of office? Can you tell us a little bit about the experience when you brought the idea to them? So when the issue kind of originally was raised, the secretary of state's office did say we were not expecting this and we just were not ready for it. So I kind of asked that they respond and I think they responded. At first there was a little bit of push-back but as the project kind of unfolded and ideas came together there was a buy-in and ultimately I'm very thankful for the secretary's office because they have funded this project from the beginning all the way to the end and there's been a lot of moving pieces and there's been a lot involved in it but I'm very thankful for that. There was a push at first a little bit. Financially of course the project did cost a lot but finally there was a buy-in and in the end the project expanded beyond what I actually had expected originally. So it was great. So it's a matter of fact that Friday I was actually invited to a meeting with some community organizers, people who know here to talk about the outreach piece. So maybe Lal, that's where you play a huge role. Yeah, I'll be reaching out to the parents. I already started. I had this poster in different stores that are owned by the community members and I have talked to some of the people and I had invited them on those dates and hopefully we'll have a great turnout. And especially where there are ethnic foods from both Somali and also from Nepal. And those are the two biggest communities here in the month. But Mohamed you did talk about six languages that are where the bullet items will be existing in six different languages. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about what are those languages on top of your head. So the languages are Arabic, Nepali, Burmese, Swahili, French and what is the sixth one? Kirundi, Karen, French. Did I say Arabic and French I think? The sixth one always escapes me and unfortunately this is the old one. This is the old version. Oh Somali. Somali. That's the one I'm forgetting. Those are the languages and the way we came up with the languages was actually we used USCRI and ALV which are two local organizations obviously that deal with a lot of new Americans and migrants and folks who migrate over here. So these are the languages that they identified as the top six in terms of the United States citizens population of new Americans. Hopefully we'll be able to expand on this project and there will be a new American event point to. But this is the first and it's a pilot. Anything right now we have nothing so anything is better than what we've got right now. I'm very excited and hopefully we'll be able to expand that. Absolutely. Now that you will be voting for the first time with your father do you think that this is now the driving force behind getting the new American involved? Yes, absolutely. As I mentioned there are a lot of the community members who recently got the citizens in the process of getting the citizens in the near future and this kind of event definitely will have will teach them how to vote and then exercise their rights. So this is going to be a wonderful event. Absolutely. So now there is no reason to say oh I don't understand the Bible because now it will be translated. There is also no reason I don't have access to an interpreter. So there will be some type of level of education when you get there, right? And now I think there is also if we change gear we currently talking about in Burlington about one ballot item that is called the non-citizen voting ballot item. So that means that people who legally live here and card holders or people who are permanent residents can now participate in the local democracy. So by giving them the opportunity to vote for local elections such as cool board, such as city council, I believe mayor and also for the school district budget as well as the city's budget. So it has been a lot of controversy around the nation about this idea. And I am a city council and I think what I think I think I'm going to hold it for now but was just wondering what you guys think of that idea. Is it better for people to get their citizenship and become citizens so they can vote in all ballot items or do you think this is a good start or do you have any concern about this provision? So you know I think it's a good start for the people living who has been here visiting in the city legally. They should have some way to vote for their representatives to the person that they think they can represent them wherever they go. So I think it's a good start to me personally. I feel like it should be carried out forward so that it's not only the citizen who has the voting rights, the people who are legally here they should have some rights to vote for their representatives. That's great. And Mohammed what do you think? I agree and disagree with love. So I think it is a good route and a good opportunity for people because I do think that if you live here for a substantial amount of time you should kind of have a say in what is happening and what the taxes look like, what kind of structures are coming to city hall like you should be involved in that. The concern I have is that there are loop that creates loop holes for people to be put in positions where they can get in trouble legally. If you accidentally vote for a presidential election that can get you in a lot of trouble. And I feel like especially with the current administration. Before you know when Obama was president I don't think I would have thought about this. I would have thought twice about this. But currently realizing the current administration and the way things are seen and the political climate I feel like it is dangerous. It is the right idea. I think that there should be stipulations or policies in place that make it so that there is absolutely no doors or loop holes for people to find themselves getting deported by ICE. That should not be happening. You basically think it is a good idea but you have some concern about it. Like right now if it was maybe Obama's President Barack Obama's tenure as an executive of the nation then you would have been saying this is ICE. This is okay. But now knowing that ICE is getting stronger and stronger and have their foot almost everywhere with our driving licenses and everything it's not a good idea to hold information of non-citizens that live in our community. So I think Lael maybe you can come back to how was the process like for you to become a citizen? How long was it? I was here in the country legally so as soon as I came here we were granted the employment authorization so after one year we can apply for the permanent residence or the green card then there is the time limitation once it gets five years then I can apply for the citizenship. So that's kind of just waiting for the time but everything is like it was legal so it was not kind of very hard for me to go through the process just wait for the time and then just apply and then get it. Wonderful. And do you think a lot of people in your community Nepali community are becoming citizens? Yes they are becoming citizens. As I mentioned some of the people because of the language where they are having some problem going through the citizenship test they have always fear of the taste so that's the only problem that people from my community are having but rest of the things are just waiting for the time once it gets five years then everyone can apply for it and then. Just to piggyback off that I kind of discussed this with my mom and she said that what the city and state can do is exhaust some of those resources towards educating people ahead of time when you talk about people struggling with the citizenship test my mom was talking about how she used to have a disc that she would play in the car when she was going to the grocery store dropping us off going to work whatever it may be she would be playing it and it would ask who is the first president of the United States to answer along. What's the capital of the United States Washington DC she's answering along and so maybe education and giving people information that should be the focus ahead of time and then once they are citizens they're able to jump right in and they know how to do what they do. And I think you know personally one of the other concern is just the volunteers that are at the booths helping people to register to vote and it seems with the non-citizen voting items we're putting another extra layer onto their job responsibility you know things like that and I think one other point is just it seems like apartheid the people who are citizens here you are the people who are not citizens here you are I mean you are really dividing the community and I think personally going to the booths belong to people who went through the process who've been vetted you know ins and out who've been here legally for years and you know they bring taxes and everything and they become citizens of the greatest country of first and when you get into the booth you can vote from national election to the local to your next representative or to the school budget that really affects you directly but I think we like Mohammed what you have done is what the focus is supposed to be those who are currently citizens how do we make sure that they show up and participate in the democracy and the freedoms translated done a demo of the video done and I think you know immigration also as an immigrant I think there was a reward if you become citizen it's not because just because you're having a passport but it is also you can vote you are part of this country and I feel with the non-citizen voting you're taking that reward away from the people who really go over to that so do you have any sentiments around it we have like maybe two more minutes I came to this country in 2012 so since then I have been hearing people talking about the vote for the local representatives to the national level for the presidential candidate so I was kind of not having that rights and I felt so bad that I couldn't participate because I am not a citizen so that strike me time and again and then all the time I was thinking about getting the citizenship so I had to wait for the time and then finally the time is over and now I can vote I can exercise my right and you can vote for everything from president to school board wonderful so this is actually great and wonderful maybe before we give Mohammed to close can you tell your people in your own language about this in Nepal about the event so we don't have any more minutes maybe Mohammed you can close thank you thank you thank you yes so guys thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you yes so guys thank you very much for watching this corner here at channel 17 and next month we will see you again with another great wonderful show thank you so much and have a great evening thank you


Welcome to another edition of Islamabad today. I'm your host, Hamza Refa Lozad. Today we're going to be speaking about the startup culture in developing countries. When we talk about the developing world, it's a developing world, which is extremely dynamic and fast-paced and you do have a youth world as well. And young entrepreneurs often encounter challenges to their ability to try and make sure that they can make a meaningful impact as far as the globalized market is concerned. What are the challenges and impediments that is exactly what we're going to be examining today? I have with me co-founder of Braemers, Mr. Bada Pushnu. Mr. Bada Pushnu, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much, Hamza, for inviting me. Alright, so tell us about the startup culture in Pakistan. I'm pretty sure that many American viewers will actually want to know what it's all about. And what is Braemers all about? Sure. Thank you so much. So, structure in Pakistan is very, very different technically speaking from any developed economy, especially the US. And you know, we have a very different set of local challenges which need to be solved, which are very different than generally globalized challenges. And some of the fundamental challenges in the ecosystem are actually lack of presence of venture capitalists. They are handful of investors locally who are now national investors as well. There are US companies now investing in Pakistan as well. But earlier, just a couple of years back, there were no foreign investors. They were traditional business investors, but not venture capitalists investors for startup ecosystem. And even the local ecosystem was still very nascent. So, even if any startup or a founder has a good idea, scaling is or her idea, it's not an easy task even today in Pakistan. But our fundamental set of challenges are very different than the US or any other. For example, let me give you, by the way, I think one reason everyone would want to know why even Pakistan is important on this landscape. The reason Pakistan is important is because we are one of the largest country by population. There's a huge population of people, about 20 million people are and they're almost 50% are below poverty line who need social economic improvement. And they impact the larger globe in many different ways. We are geopolitically based in a very sensitive location, which most of us would understand. But we have very different challenges. For example, one star challenge we have is that we are not a banked economy. Less than 20% of the population is banked. So a 2% of the people still haven't ever seen a bank account, even a mobile wallet. So that's a big challenge. Until people and the economy is documented or banked, there is nothing documented. Hence, we have a very cash based informal economy. Hence, you can't make any policies, you won't have any data, which is significant. And that's a kind of a vicious circle we need to get out of. We have is majority of the people do not pay direct taxes. And the stock figure here is that less than 1.5% people pay their taxes as a direct tax. So the government has to impose a lot of indirect taxes, which eventually impact the whole of the operation where and which means that the poor are burdened as well in addition to the ones who can afford it. Then we have other challenges like we were just talking earlier about the connectivity issues, power shortages and power. When if we have the enough power production, we do not have very reliable distribution systems. So basic utilities, fundamentals, healthcare, education, access to education, access to healthcare, access to finance, access to markets, infrastructure, there are tons of things where from an average person's point of view, these are the problems from an entrepreneur's or a founder's perspective, these are challenges that can be solved. So people who are who have that vision, they're trying to solve one small step at a time, they're trying to pick one small problem and then trying to address it and solve it. So some of the key areas where startups have really explored Pakistan, the first one was mobility, where right sharing companies like Kareem, Uber, all of them came in Uber came in, of course, as an established company, Kareem started as a startup and kicked off the rest of the industry. But their back office was mostly Pakistan and one of the founders is Pakistan. So hence, you can partially say it was kind of, there was some element of fun is it on in that stock, correct. So that was it. But then there were companies like ear lift, which really came to the news because they just before COVID, they started right sharing from a public transport perspective. But during COVID, they had to immediately pivot and they completely pivoted to a new vertical which was retail. So they wanted to then fix the grocery or the quick commerce part. And they did well, but eventually, because of some of internal issues, they and some of the unit economics issues, they eventually immediately abandoned the business. Although they're from a very consumers perspective, they were they were really doing well, and this quality of service and they didn't really know what we're doing well. So sorry for a long answer, but Pakistan started ecosystem, 10 has a lot of opportunity in itself. We need more founders. We need more founders who are solving local problems. We need more founders who are creating products for the larger world. We need more investors from abroad, of course, who have experience in venture capital who can explore this a large market population wise and area wise as well. We need more local traditional industrial investors to think more like a venture capital and start the venture arms. Some of them have already done that. So we have some local industry conglomerates who have now started their venture arms and they're investing in local startups. We need a lot more early stage investors, which means we need more very small ticket size investors give the first kick to a reasonable idea and test the market quickly as a proof of concept. We need more mentors. We need more government initiatives. The most important thing we need if you were to ask me are the right government policies. We need incentives for startups in terms of tax benefits. We need more support. We need more curriculum in our graduating classes around entrepreneurship. We need to encourage people to create more jobs for us. The mindset needs to be changed even at the education higher education level as well. So but the landscape overall, just to give you a figure in the last few years, Pakistani startups have raised formally they have raised about anywhere between 800 million to a billion dollars overall, which is very, very small globally speaking. But from a Pakistani perspective, that's a reasonable amount of money they have raised. And I think there's a huge opportunity some of them are doing well. I think they need to now grow further. Some of them are in health tech, ed tech, which are very important basic fundamental spaces. And I think there's a huge opportunity for new investors to come in and support other initiatives as well. Overall, in the larger, if you look at the larger tech industry from Pakistan, last year Pakistan's tech industry exports were around 2.6 billion dollars. We believe so this is the official documented figure from the student of Pakistan. We believe Pakistani companies are earning three to five X more than that. But not all of those all of that income is coming back into the country. So about 2.6 billion. And, and, and we believe that can be grown again significantly in multiples, if the right policies are in place by the federal government. But, but just to give you the context, those exports are now the second highest exports of the textiles in Pakistan's economy. And they employed about 300 to 500,000 employees right now. And we have about the same number of freelancers working as well. We're working for international platforms. The reason I may usually use that a lot of hungers actually come from their this background. They have some kind of a tech background, or they're doing freelancing, but they come up with an idea they learn larger base. And then they start developing their product, digital product, which is the easiest to do. And then the scale up. But there are some great initiatives which have helped the ecosystem largely as well. So from there's an there was an initiative by Ignite, which is under ministry of IT, where they have the incubation sink. So now Pakistan has about good eight to 10 incubators in different cities across Pakistan. So you have proper formal startup incubators, then there are private sector accelerators and initiatives where they are helping them as well. And there's a big move to bring entrepreneurial curriculum at the graduation and undergraduate level as well. So, so that's where we are right now in that's just fascinating and just clearly show that there's a lot of potential as far as a startup culture within Pakistan is concerned. I mean, you gave figures 2.6 billion is a pretty impressive amount in general. And we look at, you know, the economic quagmires of Pakistan is actually been facing the fact that the startup culture is actually producing something is considerable. Now tell us a little bit about Braemers as well. Sure. So Braemers was one way earlier than the startup ecosystem. So so we VST friends and the name Braemers comes from brother Amir Zeeshan. We we were in the market, we were personally engaged with different organization security after graduation. But then we all we three we three thought that we should have as well. So this is going back to getting back to 2006, by six, and we established a company and we wanted we started actually from a servicing perspective. We were doing online freelancing initially very, very briefly. And we were servicing few international clients. And then we started servicing no quick lines. We were one of the first digital marketing agencies in Pakistan, which was Google certified earlier in the day. And then as soon as Facebook came in, we were also Facebook certified as well. So we used to work with both of these principles very, very closely. And over a period of time, we realized that servicing is very human resource dependent, very talent dependent in terms of if you want to scale, the more you want to scale in terms of servicing, the more resources you require. So we also eventually do products. So we have a couple of products. One is called Fishery F I S H R Y dot com Fishery dot com. It is an e-commerce platform for the emerging markets, especially focusing on early stage entrepreneurs, small businesses and and retailers who want to set up their own were focused on their own brand development. So we enable these brands and SMEs to set up their own stores online. Very quickly and easily. So the more important is easy, because we realized that these small businesses do not have dedicated IT or technology resources. So they need an easy to use platform, which has pre integrated payments, logistics, everything. So we do that. So we powered about over 100 plus local merchants in Pakistan, we are now looking into expanding that we believe we have done the proof of concept and the product market. But you know, I want to scale it to other emerging markets and the larger global landscape as well. Another product we have, which is more related to your larger ecosystem from news publishing perspective, and and and that is publisher, you be in a SHRR not ERR dot com. So it's a content management system for news media companies. So we power a few dozen news media companies, the newspapers, their websites and their mobile apps. So it's a text that which enables newspapers to publish that content, rich content, text, video, everything. Because we again realize that most of these news organizations, their core business is news and content creation and content aggregation. So they need cutting edge technology. And that's what we provide them so that these websites do not go down when they get a breaking news or a high traffic content. And we help them then monetize that content as well. So we're getting to servicing, but we're also we also have product makers. So that's what largely very much is absolutely. I mean, if you take a look at news agencies all across the world, I think going digital is the way to go these days. And when you talk about going digital, it's also important to target that segment of the population, which is considered to be the youth bulge, especially in the developing world, who are less concerned about, you know, sitting in front of the television and more concerned about making sure that they could, you know, just read a quick two minute report from an app or from, you know, from YouTube for that matter. So I think the fact that you're actually facilitating this is quite an achievement. Now, by the way, when we talk about, you know, I just want to come up with this, you know, this preconceived notion that is actually shared by many Western analysts will believe that serious impediments do exist for startups in countries such as Pakistan. How much is this true? And how much of this is the palace? So yes, absolutely. There are innumerable impediments for startups in countries like Pakistan. And I'll tell you one fundamental reason for that if you were to pick one. Yeah, and that one is that most of these countries were colonized colonized at some point in time. And that period was generally the industrial era period. So most of our regulations inherited regulations, policies, everything is more from an industrial era perspective, modified a bit to the current age, but they're certainly not knowledge economy based and startups are mostly knowledge economy ecosystem players. So we need to improve at times certain regulations, but we certainly need to completely repad certain regulations. And so those policy level challenges are the first impediment. So I'll give you an example. Defining whether a startup is a product or a service or a good or a service from a taxation perspective, or a tech company is something that needs to be done. So in Pakistani regulation, it is still not very clearly defined. Similarly, you also need to facilitate that because it's because of colonial error laws. Of course, that's inherited from that perspective. But now it's been years and decades that we need to understand that we need to change that part. So someone at the local level leads to the challenges that startups are mostly digitally native founders, whereas the policy makers are digital immigrants. So that's really need to understand how yeah, so they need to really understand how YouTube works, how content monetization works, how online communities work, what is peer to peer networks, and all of B2B B2C and how all of this works and how democratized content creation is. So unless the policy makers really understand and have native to it, I think bringing about change is not easy. So so that's that but that's not the only reason I'm just sharing. Similarly, I'll give you an example. Yeah, but you might have noticed that Pakistan startups raised this 802 billion million to a billion dollars in the last few years. Before that, you never heard about Pakistani startups raising reasonable amount of funding. And the only reason was that the center bank, which is the statement of Pakistan changed a few regulations during this period. And this was during the previous particular era and in the G30, those few regulations, and those what needed to define that there can be a holding company abroad, and they can be an operating company in Pakistan. This is generally technically known as Oracle and then once there are few other regulations, one of those things legally, then startups can raise funding in the old co abroad and then bring required cash to Pakistan or the operating company. And that's how investors are also kind of protected and the startups also start getting their funding. But this framework was not allowed in the Pakistani regulation earlier. So I saw my next question when we talk about bureaucracy in general. I mean, the bureaucracy must have been resistant to this entire idea why they're bypassing us, why they're bypassing red tapeism, why they're bypassing all these regulations that we put in. One of the reasons why investors get scared of actually coming to countries like Pakistan is because of it. Absolutely. But there are few gyms and champions in the bureaucracy. So if you find the right champion, he or she will take you a long way. So we'll give you an example. It's a box and droplets first in almost policy in 2019, late 2019. Since then, under that policy, and I was part of that kind of larger team, which which kind of profit that part. So it was a public private partnership, which which really went well with Ministry of Commerce and the larger private sector. And that policy, we had action items against. And those items just started executing with all the relevant policy ecosystem players. So from the central bank to the tax authorities to everyone. Some of them were very responsible and some weren't and still aren't. But those who are responsible, I'll give you two quick examples. Definitely. So we work with the Central Bank of Pakistan, State Bank of Pakistan. And we actually help change and create two new regulations. One was called small packet micro exports. So for example, if a woman want to know or in or an artisan, create something small, maybe a designer clothing, or maybe a shoe or anything, maybe a wooden tray or any handicraft, and he or she wants to sell it abroad for a few hundred dollars. That that shipment was never considered export, although it is actually commercial price reduction. And it should be considered an export. Only a full container load sent abroad via ship or by air was considered export. And you need to fill a proper documented e form to consider to make that shipment considered an export. So we worked with the central bank and we kind of created a simpler, easier version or small entrepreneurs and artists so that they can send their shipments abroad, even small businesses. And that can be still considered export. So from a few thousand exporters, we believe we will now have a few hundred thousand exporters in the next few years, just because anyone who can create something can now ship. And then the regulation we got worked out with the central bank was the B2B2C use case, the business to business to consumer use case. So right now exports was all about B2B. You want companies sending products to another company abroad. But in this case, the B2B2C use case was when Pakistan got listed on Amazon market rates. Right, right. So when when you are selling something on Amazon, you are actually not selling anything to Amazon directly, but you are shipping it to Amazon. But then Amazon sells it to the consumers. So the projection is from Pakistani business to Amazon warehouse B2B. And then Amazon actually helping you send it to the consumers. That's the B2C part. So until the C part, B2C part is completed, the projection is not complete. And our regulation did not recognize that fact. So we actually worked with the central bank to solve that. And just to give you a high level number, our estimate is that around $300 million of new export or documented export has happened under these two new regulations in the last years. And this is only because the public and the private sector worked together very, very closely under the e-commerce policy. So there was a National e-commerce council formed, and some of us worked together day and night. But there were champions in the bureaucracy who helped us navigate that kind of, I would say, a long doctoral, which we really was needed. But so if there's a will, there's a way. So if the right people in bureaucracy accept the fact and agree to the fact that digital is, and if they're open to change and bringing about change, I think we can change Pakistan's economic landscape very, very quickly in a positive way. Alright, absolutely. So I've also consulted with Google Facebook and Twitter as the first person on ground from Pakistan. That's quite an achievement. Now tell me about that experience and how has that really benefited you? Because the idea that you just, you know, actually showcased to me, it's almost as if it also has a lot to do if I'm not wrong with your experiences with Twitter, Google and Facebook. Absolutely. It was just, I would say a mind-boggling experience, a real global exposure, I would say. So I think it all started with Google. So back in 2005, a friend of mine shared an email with me where Google was looking for a country representative in Pakistan. And I believe by the time I got to know about it, it was a few months already that it was floating on different forums, which meant that almost every computer science student back then would have applied for Google. But I also tried my luck. So although I am an economics graduate, I did apply for that. And interestingly the next day I got a callback that you are, you have a scheduled interview. Anyway, went through a series of interviews for almost a year. And then in August, 2006, I got admitted into Google. And but that completely changed my landscape, my exposure, my vision, my view on how the world works and what is an opportunity largely. And the reason I'm saying this is because Google didn't even know what to do with us. So we were part of the larger scouts. And the reason they hired us was that they wanted to see those countries where Google is popular, but Google does not have an office as to what is in that in those countries, what is happening by Google is popular. And back then, if I'm not wrong, if you remember, there was a Google social network called awkward. Yeah, so we was free to be able to buy that. So it was it was basically a Turkish social media organization. Yeah, correct. Absolutely. It was actually a Turkish engineer at Google who created that. So it was on a stream. So so they saw traction in those products and they wanted to see what Pakistan was and remember this was a post 9 11 time. So Pakistan was didn't have very good PR back then. But eventually I got chocolate shared. My idea was to connect dots between Google and Pakistan, anything between Google and Pakistan, wherever we could work together. So so that gave me a lot of opportunity. I helped the Google Maps team launch maps and so now you have these maps based startups like the creams and the Uber and the food delivery like food pandas and anything which is very geolocation sensitive product or an app is working on Google Maps. Yeah, absolutely. So that's so that's launched Google Chrome in Pakistan. We launched Android and Pakistan. We did tons of new things. We did a lot of Google front of Google front of nose initiatives in Pakistan. We did funding actually of a lot of startups early stage startups back then. So those kind of things. So that was very broad, white and deep as well at times. And that gave me a lot of exploring. Then I spent about good nine years by the way at Google. And then moved on and the day I left Google, I wanted to go back to my company pretty much. But then a friend at Google, who had left a little bit earlier was at Twitter and he called me that we have to now work for us for a year. So join Twitter for a while. And then I moved on to Facebook. So all three roles were very different, very interesting, gave me opened a lot of doors and eyes for me in how things happen. So yeah, that was a great, I would say dream come true. Even today, I think there are a lot of Pakistanis at Google, but very few were really relevant to the Pakistan market. So I had that opportunity to open up those doors back in the day. So about because we're running short on time, very briefly, it just tell me, you know, for young entrepreneurs, there's a high degree of, you know, anticipation that their startups could actually fail across the world. And you know, Pakistan development world is not really an exception to that case. Only a minority of them actually make it through. So why do you think that's the case? And what advice would you give to them? And you have to keep it very great, which is a bit of a challenge. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, there's several reasons, of course, tons of reasons, it would be a poor product or anything. But some of the research does show that the number one reason is that these startups actually run out of cash. They do not manage their finances properly at initial early days. They think it's easy. They do not have the right finance and accounting people or concern with them. And hence they run out of cash very, very quickly. They burn that and technically mostly waste of them. So that's one reason I believe the other reason is that they do not do proper consumer research. And they believe that whatever they are perceiving about the product or service is acceptable in the market, whereas it's not. It's maybe the demand may not be big enough. So that's another reason. And there could be other but mostly it is around the business model, which is not properly tested and tried. So these are some of the, I would say, basic flawed business model issues, which I could create this challenge. So these are very fundamental issues. There's another one. It's not the right team. So maybe in three MBS trying to do a tech, tech people trying to do a marketing startup. So that's not the right connect. You need to really normal the space. Correct. I hope that was short and sweet. Now it was very short and sweet. And I think the advice is something that many young entrepreneurs should actually take hold, because a lot of them are into the startup culture. It looks very attractive. They're sick and tired of the bureaucracies. And you know, the lethargy that is actually so the associated with government policy. So I think this advice is something that they should definitely take home and try and implement. Go founder of Braver's, Mr. Brother Pushnu. Thank you so much for joining me on the show. Thank you so much. I'm so for him. That's all that we have from Islamabad today on Think Tech of Hawaii. You can follow us on our social media pages. You provide us with your feedback. Until next time, take care.


All right, 11 secrets that millionaires know that everybody else in the world is clueless on let me reveal what those are for you You know, I love books. It's good book Really good book good book all these books about you know How to make more money financial freedom wealth and all that and one of most common questions I get is like tie, you know, what is it if you had a list like here like if I would put down 11 secrets What would they be and I've thought through those long and hard You know the first time you make a million you it causes you reflect to reflect and You'll go what the heck happened. Was it luck, you know, I was just reading a book on this book on the founding of Twitter You know, was it luck? Is it some people have? More access and know the right people There's some truth to all of that But for you and I If you want to create true wealth I think there are definite secrets that most people don't know and it's not secrets in like a conspiracy theory Illuminati kind of way. It's just not stuff. Think about back at your school what you learn You never learn the stuff that you really need to know. So Let me try to lay out a few of them. I don't know if I can write all 11 on the board here I want to make a short video one Vrin That's a term VRIN your Vrin score. This is a huge predictor of Your wealth I mean without a doubt, you know, this are things now I dropped out of college, but If you go to Harvard if you get an MBA, you'll learn about this now most people though in the world Maybe you're like me, you know, I was broke sleeping on a couch or you come from You know, not a very nice place you born in What do they call it the lower The lower class, you know, I was born to a single mom Wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth and This Vrin score something that I didn't learn for you know till I was in my 20s But once I knew it it made all the difference in the world And so you got to know your Vrin score, you know, which is basically value Rare in imitability and non-substitution now I don't know if I'm explaining all those but I want to just give you the high level one And then I'll show you how you can learn all of them if you want to know number two there's a wealth index a Guy did a very famous study and wrote a book called the millionaire next door we studied self-made millionaires across the United States and His conclusion or in one of his conclusions was that you can Look at people's wealth index. So you basically take your age All right, it's a factor of your age your net worth meaning how much money you have in your bank account and all the things you own minus your debts and It needs to be at a certain level of the ratio. Okay, so it's not an absolute number So you can have a high wealth index Even if you only have make, you know, two thousand bucks a month Even if you only have five hundred bucks in the bank account wealth index is an index of how well you accumulate and For example, he talks about in that book that doctors who traditionally I think the average doctor in America makes like a hundred and fifteen thousand dollars a year So high income, okay doctors, but doctors are notorious for having a low wealth index score for various reasons One of them is when you're a doctor you got to kind of look like your doctor So they have a lot of expenses. So they have a their wealth index measures them the average doctor to have Below average accumulation habits. So you got to accumulate. It's not how much you make. It's how much you keep I got a friend Who makes who made 120 million dollars last year? Okay, and he has a very high wealth index He kept like 90 million dollars is a young guy like in his 30s who also self-made didn't inherit the money He didn't have a trust fund and he asked us so your wealth index. That's you know, 11 secrets millionaires. No Some millionaires don't know it, but the good ones do number three I can go a lot of different directions with this one But stacking the ability to stack trends.  I'm gonna do big things whether they're musicians Entrepreneurs movie, you know filmmakers actors here in Hollywood like whatever the thing is they're like I got a good idea and there's a trend and look this is how I'm gonna make a million dollars I'm gonna make a billion dollars, but it's not as simple as just taking one idea because one simple trend Let's say you catch a trend like social networks. That's been a trend in the last five or ten years, right? Twitter snapchat Facebook now you got new ones like Meerkat and you got Periscope and all these new constantly evolving social networks So for you to just have an idea of a social network, it's not a trend It's only one trend and you must stack multiple trends. So there's a way to do this I don't know about I yeah, I'll show you how you can do this a little bit later I'm not gonna do this in this video, but it's powerful man, and you look at somebody. I'll give you an example Snapchat so snapchat is not just one trend Evan Spiegel who's the youngest billionaire in history. Okay, the youngest self-made he made it before he's 23 He did not just go. I'm gonna make a social media app like social media apps That's not a that's not trend stacking. He tracked multiple trends. So he took like four. So one trend was Obviously social networking another one was apps. The third one was selfies. See that's a trend people forgot that selfie You know you see selfies made fun of a lot Kim Kardashian did a selfie book I actually have it here somewhere selfie book But and people laugh at that but I Learned from my mentors and by the way, that's where I learned these secrets I wasn't born knowing these my mentors are like, no don't laugh at these things You might not agree with everything but pay attention So you pay attention and Evan Spiegel who's the founder snapchat he paid attention to selfies Then the fourth trend that he stacked was privacy. See you don't want to post all your pictures See Instagram was a three trend stack But snapchat took those three Trends of selfie social networking apps and added a fourth one which was privacy You could post the picture on snapchat and boom 10 seconds later it disappeared and that created tremendous wealth by the wealth This one secret alone Is not a secret of a millionaire. That's a secret of billionaires We can go to another level if we want to in this talk But I figured I'd start with millionaires because that feels overwhelming and even if you don't want to be a millionaire You still want to learn the principles a million of millionaires Even if you only want to be financially free and you know make 75 grand a year and just live You know have all your bills taken care of not have that stress whatever your number is now the fourth one is What I call nudist Buddhist Okay, I learned this one from Alan nation excuse my horrible handwriting, but that's supposed to say nudist Buddhist and Alan nation one of my mentors he said tie You can't be too ahead of your time. You can't be perceived as too weird He said look if you have a friend and you pop in and say hey, man I've decided I'm a nudist your friend. I'll be like, you know what that's a little weird But you're my friend I'm gonna give you that and he said you can tell your other friends that you're a Buddhist And they'll be like, ah, you know, I don't know much about Buddhism a little weird But I'll still be your friend, but he said you can't be a nudist Buddhist It's too weird and so a lot of people many people have tried to make to do a big thing a new idea new business New patent a new invention and they're ahead of their time or they present it in too weird of a way You know the story of Groupon, which is another amazing story of people going rags to riches The founders I think was three or four of them that started group on They said that people had tried it before them But it was perceived as too weird And so Groupon had this like, you know, these coupons you get 90 off whatever haircuts and massages and all this stuff Well Groupon took it and packaged it up in such a way that a quote-unquote weird idea Virtual couponing well, it became very mainstream. So they didn't violate the nudist Buddhist rule So these are four there's 11 and each of these I could talk about for a long time I don't want to bore you with everything right now, but I will tell you if you're watching this I'm going to do I get asked about these and the other seven so much that I decided I was going to just dedicate a talk So there should be a link here somewhere where you can click Above here and it's a little link and you can register. It's a completely free talk. Don't worry. There's no cost to it And I'm going to explain each of these more in depth and the other seven Okay, because I want to keep this video Sure, how long has this one been? This is like five minutes or something Five or ten minutes. So I want to keep this one short because modern world people have You know 80d and maybe you're watching this when you're busy and you got other things to do So if you click the link, it'll give you a time you can register Um, and it's online. So you can be in any country in the world You have access, you know to the internet you can watch this. So it's my free talk Explaining this the 11 secrets that millionaires know revealed and how you can use them To create wealth and financial freedom whether or not you want to be a millionaire It's for entrepreneurs. It's for people who are, you know, like I was you're completely in the gutter It could be you've got no, uh, you know, you're in debt from college debt or credit card debt I read the average americans like 240 000 in debt if you count mortgages and So there's debt out there these secrets work and I'm telling you and these aren't random Secrets you see these secrets being used by the smartest people in the world over and over It's just that, you know, this is the kind of stuff that millionaires teach their kids But if you're like me and you weren't the the son or daughter of a millionaire You didn't have anyone to teach you this so I I went out. I traveled with, you know I've been about 50 plus countries trying to find mentors. I found five of them And uh, they're the ones who taught me all this stuff. So click the link It's either above or below and never tell where it's going to be Click the link you it'll take you to my website and there's just a register It's completely free and then you'll see the exact time We'll translate it into your time zone wherever you are in the world and then just show up You can watch it on your phone. You can watch it on your computer and I'll be going in depth and I'm telling you These two right here number one and number three are so powerful. I could literally just stop there but um The other ones are important too and when you blend them all together the you know, they call that synergy an exponential effect Like one of these you understand It'll have a good effect on your bottom line your bank account two of them together One plus one is more than two. That's what synergy is, you know These two together will not just double your understanding. They might triple it and when you add 11 together it's mind-blowing and so You know this book right here self-made billionaire effect It's one of the most exhaustive and well done scientific studies of self-made billionaires and uh It's interesting. They're a final conclusion in the book. I don't want to spoil the book if you haven't read it it's not my book by the way, but uh is that They've isolated for luck for access to resources To being born in a better place to being healthier to what country you're born in and and their conclusion in that is that it's Habits of the mind That made these people billionaire just like Arnold Schwarzenegger What had like habits for his body to become you know one of the top bodybuilders in the world There's habits of the mind and that's as simple as What you know like Warren Buffett says and I always quote the more you learn the more you earn So click the link here show up learn stuff You will earn more. It's free um And so yeah, click the link and I will see you it's uh On the talk you can even ask me questions on the talk You know if you want to chat there's chat and stuff and you can ask while i'm talking So click the link register and we'll be talking about 11 secrets that millionaires know revealed And how you can use them in your life and and they'll change your life the day you watch it So Uh these things by the way forgot to add last time I did one the last two times. I've done these it has crashed the servers Literally, I'm not making that up like I had where it's the we had to like change the architecture of our website to handle How many people come so I kind of limit how many people can get on this So make sure you don't procrastinate click the link is free You know I tell people anytime you have a chance for something and it's free. There's no downside Do it immediately. So check it out. We'll be talking on brand wealth index accumulation score stacking multiple trends nudist buddhist And lots of other stuff seven more things uh at the minimum. All right, so click the link and I will see you on my talk Uh, we'll be talking all these in depth. All right cool Oh and subscribe to my channel I'm not supposed to add that my video guys say to do that. All right. Talk to you soon


A lot of you guys have been asking for me to do a review on OSCE or the offensive security certified expert. I've also had a lot of requests for OSWE the web expert and OSWP now the Wi-Fi one. So in this video, I want to do that or OSCE the offensive security certified expert. So here we go. Let's do this.  So I want to kind of deep dive into what I do my methodology when I'm going through one of offensive security's courses and show you some of my notes that I can show you and everything that I can realistically show you with the disclaimer that I'm obviously not going to divulge anything from the exam. I want to give you everything that you can still already find online. I just kind of want to help organize it so you guys know what to look through and what to actually work with. So I guess I'll dive in first actually with the course itself. So offensive security, they put out CTP or cracking the perimeter and that is the mandatory course that you have to take in order to take the offensive security certified expert or OSCE exam. So this sort of continues where OSCP or OS or PWK sorry penetration testing with Cali left off. It's kind of considered I think in some circles like the big brother or the older brother to PWK. And with that note when I say older I mean that right now this course has not been updated and it is old like old and that they'll ship with it a backtrack virtual machine for you to work with. And you're working with Ali debug for a lot of your debugging. In that regard, it needs a refresh but I know PWK and OSCP got that update for 2020. So regardless, this is meant to be more exploitation oriented. So not just simply pulling an exploit off the shelf or grabbing it through search sploit or the exploit DB or exploit database. What this one is all about is more about crafting your own exploit writing something in Python or whatever scripting language you prefer. I guess I really recommend Python. That is more about OSCE is more about creating your exploit understanding why this buffer overflow works the way that it does. Moving on to bypassing a SLR address space layout randomization or taking advantage of SEH or structured exception handler. Exploitations. It has a little bit of web stuff in there. It talks about egg hunters and manual shell coding writing your own shell code and trying to encode it or obfuscating the ways it's not detected, etc, etc. So you can totally read up on that if you want to view the syllabus online, or look through some of really what what this covers here in their online kind of breakdown. There are tons of reviews. And I really want to point you towards those.  I store all of these on my external hard drive. And again, I really, really recommend that you guys get a set of these just so you have kind of a library of certifications that you go through your notes, your resources, your material. So if you ever need to look back on them, you can. I mentioned that in an earlier video with, I think, EJ PT, some of the you learn security stuff is that I've now started to do this, I have like 10 different color to hard drives, so that just so I can keep track of my own library and keep myself sane. So I really recommend you do that. Okay, let's dive into some of my notes here just so I have a structure of what I want to make this video about. So here, when I start an offensive security course, I create a markdown file, I do everything in markdown, because that's just kind of my workflow. I know some people really like cherry tree, I just tend to work in sublime. I need to get back to arch and do some stuff in VIM be real level. Anyway, I use markdown to write my report, I use it to take notes, I do all of my documentation and kind of bookkeeping in markdown and I use that. What is it called ice Vogel kind of Pandoc template so that this can automatically be converted into a PDF. And it looks nice and pretty and beautiful and has images and everything and everything. So I took this course way back. Just after I finished up with OSCP, kind of the end of 2019, I think I had the start of the course in September. Yep. And then it would Oh, no, no, I bought it in September started to take notes and prep for it. And then it began for me in October and labs would go until 30 days in my case. So just November, I think I ended up taking the exam in October, we can probably take a look if I look at the PDFs. Anyway, let's talk about more of the topics. It is going to touch upon some cross site scripting, local file inclusion and common web attacks. This is a super duper small portion of the course, because I guess it continues off of OSCP and it's showcasing more exploitation stuff. But this is not the focus of OSCE. It's called certified expert. And it's all about exploitation. It's about binaries. It's about doing the stuff with computer programs and memory in the stack and registers and all of that kind of lower level stuff. You only see this really once when you're getting into kind of the the course and what follows. Oh, I bumped my mic. Sorry. With that, you still need to know how to do it. But you'll have one machine and you'll see some some actual activity that you need to perform that is much more OSCP like. And that's how it kind of makes that continuation from that. And then it gets into the real actual executable stuff or the exploitation oriented things. You'll backdoor some executables or make it so that when you pop open notepad or a calculator, it's also going to call a reverse shell back to you. What I recommend is because you might be like, Well, hey, Metasploit can do that for me. MSF Venom knows how to do that. Yes, I know, you're not allowed to do that in this case, you have to do it manually. And that's what the course is trying to teach you how you could write something. And I actually kind of went down this rabbit hole for a while. I found out like this, the pi modules, the Python modules to work with L files or exe files, sorry, the portable executables. And I would try and write something that would automatically backdoor and executable rearrange whatever is necessary to get a code cave so we can put shell code in there and jump to it, etc, etc. Maybe do some x or encoding so it hides our backdoor injection. And you're going to need to do that. But you need to do it manually. You can't use any of those tools or if you wrote your own, it wouldn't help you because you are forced and and really, really mandated to go ahead and do this through your debugger. And that's not that bad. Honestly, they'll show you the steps and everything on how to do that. They give you a little bit more stuff on bypassing SLR with the partial EIP overwrite, maybe not strictly a bypass of a SLR. I don't spend a whole lot of time on this and I think it's only covered in a cursory fashion. seh exploits or the structured exception handler exploits, you absolutely need to know how to do that. You're gonna end up doing it with egg hunters. And that's one method of going and finding your shell code. Really, really cool technique. Personally, I didn't end up doing much more with it after the fact. That's just me. Again, your mileage may vary. What I want to explain to you, though, is I know a lot of people say, again, OSCE is very old, in that some of these techniques, yeah, backdooring with an X or stuff. Well, that's not very modern day. That's not very real world right now. Same thing with egg hunters or seh or structured exception handler. Those stuff may be okay, it's not up to date for today's standards of offense and defense on a local host or on a machine. Yes. Okay. Cool. So what I guess I hear the phrase often, you need to learn how to walk before you can before you can run, right? So you need to get these fundamentals down. And that's what this course is wanting you to do is to learn some of the low level stuff on what's actually happening on the binary in the binary between the stack and the memory and the registers, etc, etc. And that's what OSCE is all about, even if it's going through some older techniques for this sort of exploitation, or exploitation, sorry. Fuzzing is huge in this course, you need to absolutely know how to fuzz and you did this probably previously in OSCP or PWK, if you took that course, when you were making your buffer overflow exploit. Good. They taught you how to use it with spike, which is a cool fuzzer I think built into Cali it has some strange commands like generic TCP send it that you wouldn't know correlate to spike. I would recommend that learn spike get it down the syntax isn't that hard to pick up. But I would move on to bufuz and you've probably seen me use this in some other videos I did it for my volenserver hter exploit. I've also done it in my shell code for the masses webinar that I did with the ethical hacker network. I really really think just pick up bufuz the syntax is easy, you just kind of get boilerplate you slap it in your good. And then you won't need to do that later. bufuz is going to be really good at showing you where it crashed because it'll save its results, etc, etc. You can see my video if you want the volenserver HDR one. Okay, it also discusses some network attacks with GRE. This again is just a small sliver at the very, very end of the course. You may not necessarily need to be a master at that focus on the binary exploitation stuff and a little bit of the web stuff that you should already be pretty strong in through OSCP. Okay, some gimmicks that I want to recommend because the course is using Ali debug. You can use Ali debug if you want to. But it's you, right? You're the person that is going through the exam, you're the person that is going through the material, you're the one trying to practice and you're the one trying to learn if you like a different tool. Again, in Windows debugging and disassembling and working with PE files or exes. Personally, I use immunity debugger because I just did that through OSCP for the buffer overflow. And I've done that in every other case where I needed to do an exploit on a Windows machine for a Windows binary and Mona Mona dot pi is awesome and incredible. I really like that it's kind of built into immunity. I know immunity is very clunky. If you're not a gooey guy, and I don't consider myself a gooey guy, that's weird to say. But Mona dot pi can help automate and help do a lot of the things that you will need to do, especially for finding jump instructions for kind of finding specified or specific actual, maybe encoded or alphanumeric encoded instructions, or ones that will work well with alphanumeric bytes. And finding your MSF pattern, if you use a cyclic pattern to find an offset to an EIP instruction, or where you're doing your overflow, or I think you can even do excellent things with SEH, it'll find the structured exception handler position, and even the end SEH or the next one that we do follow and you will use to jump and move to get to a buffer that you can actually work with and put your shell code in. Okay, enough of me talking on that. Those are my recommendations for gimmicks that you might see in the course. Use whatever you want to use. But I tout immunity, because that's I guess what I use. I want to do something different with this course and exam. When the exam began, I wanted to actually kind of get a schedule for myself. So I know I could keep on track. There are less machines, just slightly less than what you would see on OSCP, maybe if you're if you're more used to that. That's a good thing. But it also means that it's a higher stakes, because OSCP you need 70 points to pass. I don't know what numbers I'm holding it. For OSCE, you need 85 points to pass. So you essentially need to compromise everything. Truth be told, that just what you have to do. And I'll dive more into that. But those are the challenges. And I tried to break it down. Hey, time wise, this is how much time I have allocated for each of these things. It's not going to take you this much time, or at least we can hope that it wouldn't take you this much time to go through some of these challenges. The ones that are more OSCP like, you might be able to whip out pretty quickly in a couple hours. And then the other ones you're going to need to spend a lot more time with, because you are wrestling with your debugger, you're trying to figure out why your shell code doesn't work, you're determining bad bytes, you're getting your offset, you're doing all those exploitation things. So, okay, next thing that I kind of want to touch on is, do your research. Seriously, do your homework. And I don't know, I might just be crazy about this. This might just be like a strange symptom or condition that I have, is that I will Google so much, I'll Google everything, just literally Google OSCE review, OSCE exam recap, OSCE, and just I want to get other people's experiences, I want to get their resources, I want to learn what they did to prepare. And I really, really recommend you do the same, you literally just Google the course name. And there are tons of these out there. Maybe less so than OSCP, right, because it's a little bit more specific and niche. I did make a little list of a lot of these reviews, you can go check out. And I'll share this, I guess in the description, or if anyone wants it, ping me message me discord, etc. Okay, a lot of these you can just find simply by Googling. And this is probably just a data dump of like the first Google results. What I would kind of recommend as a Bible for your study, if you're going ahead and researching and doing some of these things. Topo security has a phenomenal resource on actually prepping and preparing for OSCE, the certified expert exam. They kind of tout the same things that I do they actually mentioned slay, or the shell coding Linux advanced exploitation thing that security tube or pentester Academy put out. Some people ask me, hey, is this a good course to prep for OSCE? Yes. So I bought slay, and I did it because it was only I think like 130, or it wasn't a whole lot of money, it would be easy to just kind of jump in and check out the videos learn a little bit. It did help me with learning assembly and it did help me with getting shell code, manually writing shell code kind of down pat, and actually is what spawned that Hello World video that I had made an assembly that some reason got like 100,000 views. Thanks for that guys. But I do really recommend if you want to if you're willing to spend the extra cash, go and check out that SLE course. You don't have to. I recommend it's not necessary. But if you just feel like you want a little bit more exposure, that is a great thing to include. And that you can find out there. Or just Google SLE course. I think it might have a different name now.  But get your material ready. I spun up a virtual machine and I would have a virtual box that was ready for me with Windows XP Windows 7 Windows 7 actually made sure to get a 32 bit one and make sure you got x 86 32 bit one because finding an egg hunter, getting that egg hunter code to work is going to be very, very different and very, very not working on a 64 bit machine for what you're trying to do when you're testing some of that stuff. Make sure you can get one of those machines. Just you can find a Windows ISO. I know you can and get immunity installed on there or whatever debugger you want. Go ahead and get Yeah, I know Windows, you're not genuine. It's okay. Get Mona, get bufas, get volume server on there and be able to practice that I even got like the Lord PE to do some backdooring stuff. And of course, immunity debugger, you can see me dive into more of that not just talking about it in a surface level with the volume server video. Again, HDR and I'll make more of those. It sounds like you guys really like those and you want to see more of those. I'll cover those. It is later video. Really, really recommend Tulpa security because it's great to kind of get a sanity check and just a benchmark on every single section, what it's going to end up covering what resources they recommend and other things you can learn from. The biggest thing that I did to prepare was practice with vone server. You guys have probably already heard of vone server and you know that I made a video on it for just HDR one. Steven Bradshaw is the guy that put this together. It's just a Windows binary. It's just a command line server that opens up a socket, listens on a port, and you can have vulnerable commands or vulnerable functions that that program is going to do. They don't do anything. They literally are useless. If just other than to showcase, you can exploit this vulnerability. It's just for learning purposes, just for the sake of your education. And this is so well known now that there are tons of write ups and kind of even video tutorials, right on how to go through a specific function and how to break into it. You can find it on GitHub. I really, really, really, really recommend doing this. I probably would not have passed had I not practiced and kind of written a lot of code and made things already set for myself with vone server. That is really what I tout by. I'm showcasing the GitHub screen and I realize you can't see it. Go download it. Steven Bradshaw, vone server, get it on your Windows machine and tinker. It's very, very cool. They showcase even some tutorials here, spike seh stuff. And oh, looks like great corner actually has some Steven has some as well. Once that I ended up using. And I and I tout by this as well is homebrews blog. I don't know if I'm pronounced your name, right? Please forgive me. He ran through OSCE and he did so much prep to work through this sort of thing with fuzzing with seh overwrites with egg hunters and he did it all with vone server and some other other things that he actually recommended you can dig through a lot of his pages. I think they're on like page three or four. You can see his last post and then for he gets into lots of different other. Here's how I did this specific function in vone server. Here's what I learned here are the resources that I went through and found that out and really recommend you go through LT er that is the hardest most toughest one. HDR just has that hex encoding gimmick that I showed you in that video. GM on is absolutely necessary because that showcases an seh exploit. Trun is the kind of classic buffer overflow that you could essentially see an OSCP or other simple right straight to the point of buffer overflows. Show coder also has some great write ups on these. I really recommend you go check out those if you just can't track down or figure out hey I'm beating my head against the wall. I don't know what I'm I haven't got a lead on a vone server function. There's no shame. There's honestly no shame in just looking up a write up and trying to learn because that's the whole thing. You're trying to learn. Don't don't shame yourself on that if you're like literally wasting time because you can't get any progress. It's okay to research and do that do that look. Humbra also showcases some other things you could just pull off of exploit database and see if you could recreate or also craft your own exploit for that specific program. I never ended up doing this but it was on my list. So take that with a grain of salt. If you want the extra practice you can totally do it. I didn't really need it. I think vone server was enough. I maybe I just didn't make time for it. Humbra also recommends a little bit of a Booge in some cool strips some cool scripts and tools that he's put together for even exploiting HTTP or some kind of services that might need more of a specific header or prefix in the packets and the data that you send it because you might need to fuzz in a different location. It might not always be one specific input for the program you're exploiting. Okay, really, really, really recommend you practice on those. Let me get into the last thing that I'll talk about and then I'll pivot to some my other code and things sub encoding. We mentioned that you are going to be backdooring some executables. You're going to be putting in a backdoor so that it will call back to you with a reverse shell or a bind shell whatever you want to create. While it opens up and runs a regular program like calc or notepad. A lot of times in some cases some of these binders are going to be sensitive for bites that aren't just alpha numeric. Let me go to my face so I can get real with you guys. That is hard to do for one thing. And you have a big restriction. You have so many bad bites and only limited sort of good bites. So what you can do is you can sub encode your shell code so that you actually use the ESP register so you can push something into the stack and then pop it on there. So literally as if it's it's generating or what's the right word? It's not dissolving and evaporating or like making it disappear operating on the stack and into the instruction set that your program is going to run through. That is something that I would really recommend that you learn how to do. In fact, I would recommend you learn how to automate sub encoding. There are some resources that I save it. Okay, yeah. Some resources that talk about how you can do this kind of by hand. And then I would recommend you sort of abstract that and write something that can get some Pacific hex instruction and determine how you can go ahead and calculate parts of it or chunks that will help you on the stack build up and do some math to get the instruction that you need in whatever chunks are necessary. This goes into a little bit more in the weed stuff. I won't talk about it right now. But I really, really, really recommend that you know how to do this for one thing manually. You're going to have to it's in the books and you're required to but automating this process is really going to help you when it comes down to crunch time because you need to actually have this set up. You're going to have to use this. You're going to have to sub and code. So know how to do that. Okay. And another good link on showcasing that that might help it stick in your brain is velo sec. They have a good article on this and it showcases just another methodology or maybe a better way of at least explaining or describing the process to you so you understand how you're using different registers to store a value doing some math to get the correct value only using alphanumeric bytes again and then putting that on the actual instructions and it'll just be executed because you grew it into your program, which is kind of cool. I really think it's a fascinating technique and it's super cool. So automate this process if you can. I really recommend it or at least know what it is and know what you're doing. Okay. Those are the talking points that I want to give. Now I guess we can kind of dive into the stuff that I have my files here. What I do when I am going through the videos for offensive security, I should have mentioned this at the beginning. When I'm going through and making that markdown file, what I do is I go through every single video and I take notes on it personally. That's just me and I'll actually rename the video in order with kind of a note as to like what the heck that this just taught me. So I can just simply search a specific topic just by the file name. If I need it in the middle of the exam, I can go track it down and know what it is. A lot of these, I just feel like, Oh, this is a useless introduction to a new topic. And some of them are like, okay, this is actually important. And I should know how to find this if I need it in the future. I also wrote code for a lot of things that I'm going to end up trying to do. In some cases, I would... This is a cool resource, actually. If you haven't seen the simple HTTP server with upload, you've seen the Python 2 module simple HTTP upload or excuse me, simple HTTP server. And that will allow you to download files to get one thing to another host with HTTP. Upload will also make it let you go back and forth. You just have some upload functionally. That's kind of cool. Kind of nice. Do that in a web browser. Make that in there. I wrote some things that would generate Pone Tools assembly code. Work for that in a nice, interpretive way so I can tinker with it on the fly. I also had stuff to prepare my report. I also had stuff to make assembly. Just quick, shorthand convenient functions and bone server. I made folders for everything that I did and went through when I was trying to put things together with bone server. Oh, actually, that's a fine tangent. I would take notes for every single section of what I was doing because there are different parts that you go through in an exploitation procedure. L-C-E-R is the hard one because you have a structured exception handler. You also have finding BLAD bytes and that one actually I think is encoded or it has a alphanumeric restriction. So, see some of my code for that. We can dive into that if you want. Bufa's results, et cetera, et cetera. What does this read me? Let's check it out together. Open it with Sublime Text. Stupid. That's, okay, I was gonna say that's not a read me. Oh, this is just getting Bufa's installed. Go check out Bufa's. I really, really recommend you could do that. Before I lose the topic of sub-encoding because I know that's recent. Slink sub-encode GitHub. Slink is the name of a tool that can do this. Humbra mentions it. Slink, yeah. That's a iHack for Falafel. Credit to him for building that sort of thing. Slink is strange and that's written in Python too. And it also has a lot of time sleep calls which are weird. If you want, you can patch those out and remove kind of the unnecessary output.  Really, really cool tool that will automate it. And you are not allowed to use that tool on the test. But good to know that it exists. And if anything, what I would recommend is you can do any of your own things. So why don't you write the tool? If you claim it as your own, if it is your own code, you made it your initiative, then I think that is what they're wanting to see for offensive security grading your test. Okay. That's enough of Slink. That's enough of Vone Server. The syllabus you can go find online. Again, I included immunity debugger and Mona. I had that in my virtual machine. I submitted a lab report. I know you don't have to because they don't ask you to do that in OSCP. You can optionally supply one. I saw actually in the exam guide though that if you want to submit it, you can. So what I did is I took all the notes that I did while I was going through the videos and then I just pooped that into a PDF file and sent that in a log of my report. That was 49 pages and my exam report. Just a quick zoom in on that. That was 77 pages. Maybe an idea for what you want to write and how much you want to write of it. Okay. That is really everything that I kind of wanted to give to you guys. I hope that maybe this will help. I would, I'd recommend practice, right? You know my opinion, and I've probably said it before on the mantra of try harder.  It's try again in my opinion. Keep at it in practice. I think I spent a lot of time in Vuln Server because I would literally try and go through every single function and I would have a script ready for me and how I would want to use that and I'd mastered the SEH technique. I'd mastered sub-encoding. I'd mastered using an egg hunter. I'd mastered the Xor stub, that procedure in immunity or all the debug, whatever you choose to use. Practice, practice, practice. I hope I can give you enough resources with everything that I've shared to let you go at it and jump in. I'm opening that back up in Sublime Text so you can see it. I'll share this and again, obviously you can ping me on the Discord server. Reach out to me. I'm here to help you guys. I want to help you guys but there's so much information that I know you've got this. Crank through it. Cool. Hey, thank you guys so much for watching. If you did like this video, please do leave that like. Hit the thumbs up. The thumbs up one, not the thumbs down. If you do hit the thumbs down, hit it twice so I know you didn't like it that much. I'll leave a comment, do the YouTube algorithm stuff and subscribe. A stutter. A stutter subscribe. Thanks for watching, everybody. I'll see you in the Discord server. Love to see you on Patreon. Love to see you on PayPal. Thanks again. Take care.