In the vast and sometimes intimidating world of cybersecurity, few educators have managed to strike a balance between technical rigor and accessibility as effectively as Fabian Faessler, better known online as LiveOverflow.
Through his YouTube channel, Live Overflow, Fabian has become a leading voice in the hacker education community, demystifying vulnerabilities, explaining hacking concepts, and encouraging ethical exploration of technology.
In this extended interview, we discuss his philosophy of “applied curiosity,” the realities of the dark web, how beginners should approach hacking responsibly, and why even seemingly simple logic bugs remain some of the most fascinating challenges in modern cybersecurity.
Interviewer: Fabian, thanks for taking the time. For people who’ve never watched your videos, how do you describe what you do?
Fabian Faessler Live Overflow: I try to make computer security feel approachable. A lot of hacking content either glamorizes the stereotype or hides behind dense jargon.
My goal is to demystify it: explain how things actually break, show you the mental models, and make it clear that hacking—at its core—is just structured curiosity.
The channel started as a place to document my learning. It turns out a lot of people enjoy watching someone else learn out loud.
Interviewer: You’ve called hacking “applied curiosity.” What does that look like in practice?
Fabian: Curiosity on its own is great, but in security you need a seatbelt. Applied curiosity means asking “what happens if…?†and then designing controlled experiments to answer that question without harming anyone.
For example, instead of poking production systems you don’t own, you stand up a local lab, run intentional vulnerable targets like DVWA or OWASP Juice Shop, or use capture-the-flag (CTF) challenges.
You combine curiosity with method: hypothesize, reproduce, measure, document, and—equally important—stop when something feels ethically questionable. Curiosity gets you started; discipline keeps you out of trouble.
Interviewer: People are fascinated by the dark web. When someone asks you, “What is it really?”, how do you answer?
Fabian: I usually start by reframing. The “dark web” isn’t one thing; it’s a collection of overlay networks—Tor being the most famous—designed to provide privacy and censorship resistance.
They are tools. Like any tool, people use them for good and bad. Journalists and dissidents rely on Tor to communicate safely. Yes, there are marketplaces and criminal forums as well.
One of the most famous entry points for finding onion services is the Hidden Wiki, which lists many links. But you should approach that with extreme caution—many of those links can lead to malware or illegal content.
If you come in thinking it’s all neon-lit cyberpunk, you’ll misunderstand the technology and the social dynamics. It’s more mundane and more complex at the same time.
Interviewer: From a defender’s standpoint, does the dark web meaningfully change the threat landscape?
Fabian: It changes the logistics and the tempo, not the fundamentals. Threat actors still need vulnerabilities, infrastructure, and money. The dark web affects discoverability, attribution, and monetization.
For instance, initial access brokers can quietly sell footholds to corporate networks. Ransomware groups can coordinate affiliates. But the same old misconfigurations and unpatched services create the openings.
If your organization is struggling with asset inventory, patch cadence, and credential hygiene on the “clear web,” anonymity networks won’t be your primary problem. They just make the bad guys a bit harder to identify and a bit faster to coordinate.
Interviewer: Many beginners ask, “Should I visit the dark web to learn?” What’s your short answer?
Fabian: No, not as your first step. You don’t need the dark web to learn security. Ninety-nine percent of the skills you need—networking basics, operating systems, web app security, cryptography concepts, reverse engineering—can be learned safely on your own machine or on legal platforms.
Visiting random onion services because it “feels hacker-y” is a good way to encounter malware or content you don’t want to see. Start with CTFs, open-source vulnerable apps, and code audits.
If you later have a legitimate research reason to explore anonymity networks, do it with strong opsec, a clear scope, and an ethics checklist.
Interviewer: Let’s talk opsec. What are some “seatbelts” for students doing legal research?
Fabian: First, define “legal research.” If you’re not 100% sure it’s legal, it’s not research—it’s risk. Stay on systems you own or have explicit permission to test. Use a dedicated lab environment: VMs or containers with snapshots so you can revert easily.
Keep clear logs of what you did and why. Separate identities: research accounts and machines shouldn’t touch your personal logins or email. Never reuse passwords.
Avoid downloading binaries from sketchy places; and if you do for analysis, do it offline and inside a sandbox. Finally, write a “stop plan.” If you unexpectedly access data that seems private or sensitive, you exit, document, and don’t share it around.
Interviewer: You’ve covered a lot of “how things break.”How do you stop them from breaking? What’s the 80/20 for defenders?
Fabian: Inventory and context. You can’t defend what you don’t know exists. Start with an up-to-date asset inventory: public IPs, domains, SaaS apps, shadow IT—everything.
Then minimize attack surface: close unnecessary ports, remove unused software, and set sane defaults. Patch fast, especially internet-facing stuff.
Enforce multi-factor authentication and kill password reuse with a manager. Monitor logs centrally, tune alerts, and run routine drills.
For web apps: input validation, proper auth flows, least privilege for service accounts, and secrets management. It’s not sexy, but in real life, security is mostly plumbing.
Interviewer: On the offensive side, what types of vulnerabilities still surprise you?
Fabian: Logic bugs. We’ve spent years getting decent at input sanitization and memory safety in some contexts, but logic is infinite. Business logic flaws—where the system does exactly what the code says, but not what the designers intended—are elegant and dangerous.
Think of bypassing a “premium feature” by replaying a different API call, or manipulating state transitions in multi-step workflows. They’re hard to scan for automatically and require human creativity to find.
Interviewer: There’s a romanticized image of the lone genius hacker. Your channel shows a lot of boring hours. Why highlight that?
Fabian: Because that’s real. Hacking is looped frustration: read source, try an idea, fail, try a smaller idea, fail differently, instrument, repeat. If you watch a polished exploit demo you miss the invisible mountain of dead ends that produced it.
Showing the struggle normalizes it. Beginners think, “I can’t do this, it’s too hard.” But most breakthroughs are just relentless iteration. I want people to see the method, not just the magic.
Interviewer: How should a newcomer structure their learning path without getting overwhelmed?
Fabian: Pick a lane for 8–12 weeks. Depth beats breadth early on. For example: “web application security fundamentals.” Set weekly goals: learn HTTP deeply, study auth flows, practice with a known vulnerable app, and solve five CTF web challenges. Document everything you learn in your own words.
Build tiny tools—even ugly ones—in Python or Bash to automate repetitive tasks. Every week, teach someone else: a blog post, a small video, or a forum answer. Teaching exposes gaps in your understanding and builds a portfolio that helps with jobs later.
Interviewer: Speaking of jobs, what signals should aspiring professionals cultivate?
Fabian: Evidence of thinking. Recruiters love certificates because they’re easy to filter on, but the people who’ll hire you for interesting work want to see your process.
A GitHub with writeups, reproducible labs, maybe a small fuzzing framework you hacked together—those are powerful signals. Participation in CTF teams shows collaboration.
A clean, respectful disclosure writeup for a bug bounty—especially if you navigated responsibly—signals maturity. And soft skills matter: can you explain a critical vuln to a non-technical stakeholder without condescension?
Interviewer: Let’s get back to the dark web. What are misconceptions that persist?
Fabian: First, that it’s inherently evil. Technology is neutral; context and incentives matter. Second, that anonymity is absolute. Operational mistakes are common, and correlation attacks are real.
Third, that visiting is automatically illegal. Accessing a Tor site isn’t a crime in many jurisdictions, but what you do there can be. Finally, people think criminals are super sophisticated. Sometimes, yes. Often, no—many are just good at social engineering.
Interviewer: Let’s talk threat intelligence. How should a small team approach “dark web monitoring” without becoming overwhelmed?
Fabian: Start with intent, not FOMO. What decision will you make based on what you find? If you can’t answer that, monitoring will become expensive theater. For most small teams, the valuable alerts are: credentials exposed, direct chatter about your brand or executives, and leaks of your internal tools or access.
You can leverage reputable vendors for this, but you still need playbooks. If you get an alert that your employee’s password appears in a breach dump, what happens in the next hour? Who resets credentials? Who checks logs? Who communicates? Intelligence that doesn’t change behavior isn’t intelligence.
Interviewer: You’ve done videos breaking down famous breaches. What patterns do you see in postmortems?
Fabian: Weak identity is a recurring theme: phishing to session hijack, then lateral movement. Excessive privileges make the blast radius huge. Lack of egress monitoring means exfil goes unnoticed.
And often, the first compromise is boring: an old VPN account, a forgotten dev system, a cloud key left in a public repo. The lesson isn’t “fear hackers.” It’s “respect complexity.” Complexity is the true adversary; attackers just exploit it faster than defenders tame it.
Interviewer: How do you think about ethics when teaching people to hack?
Fabian: Ethics isn’t a footer paragraph—it’s the frame. I push three rules. One: consent—only test on systems you own or have explicit permission to test. Two: proportionality—prefer the least intrusive method that proves the point.
Three: stewardship—use what you learn to make systems safer, and avoid glamorizing harmful behavior. Also, community norms matter: mentor beginners, discourage bravado, celebrate responsible disclosure. You can be both technically sharp and ethically grounded.
Interviewer: There’s a constant flow of new frameworks and tools. How do you choose what to learn?
Fabian: I focus on primitives and patterns. New tools are wrappers around old ideas: parsing, state machines, constraint solving, cryptographic protocols, memory safety. If you understand the underlying pattern, you can pick up a new framework in a weekend.
So I’ll spend an afternoon reading a codebase, tracing how inputs flow, and building a mental model. Then I try to break a toy version. Mastery comes from recombining old knowledge in new contexts.
Interviewer: What about AI? How is it changing security—for defenders and attackers?
Fabian: It accelerates both sides. On defense, AI helps triage logs, surface anomalies, and generate boilerplate detections faster. It lowers the barrier for small teams to build “adequate†coverage.
On offense, it helps craft plausible phishing, summarize code to spot weak points, or brute-force boring tasks like screenshot classification of admin panels. But there’s a trap: over-reliance. If you stop building your own understanding, you’ll miss when the model is confidently wrong. Use AI to amplify curiosity, not replace it.
Interviewer: Suppose a student wants to research criminal marketplaces as part of a thesis. What’s your advice to keep it ethical and safe?
Fabian: Get institutional approval first—IRB or equivalent—define a narrow scope, and align with your legal team. Use non-attributable infrastructure with clear documentation.
Do not buy contraband, do not engage, and do not “test†vendors. Collect metadata and public posts you’re allowed to archive under the policy. Redact PII in publications.
Share your methodology so other researchers can critique it. And be mentally prepared: you may encounter disturbing content. Have a plan for your own well-being and a support system to debrief if needed.
Interviewer: What’s a common mistake in beginner web app hacking?
Fabian: Treating tools as magic. Burp or any scanner is only as good as the operator. Beginners run a scan, see no critical issues, and assume the app is safe. But tools can’t reason about business logic without guidance.
Learn to read the app like a user and like a developer: what assumptions are baked into the workflow? What happens if two requests race? What if a parameter is missing? Can you pivot from user-facing endpoints to internal admin APIs? Manual thinking turns good tools into great results.
Interviewer: How do you personally keep the spark alive—after so many years of tutorials and deep dives?
Fabian: I try to remain a student. I’ll learn something outside my lane—like compiler internals or embedded systems—and then bring that back to web security or reverse engineering.
Also, teaching is energizing. When you explain something clearly, you feel the concept “click†again. The field is huge; there’s always a fresh corner to explore. Curiosity compounds.
Interviewer: If you could give a single assignment to every aspiring security researcher, what would it be?
Fabian: Pick a small open-source project—ideally something with a web interface or network protocol—and do a security review over two weekends. Write down your threat model, enumerate trust boundaries, and test three hypotheses.
Report one issue, even if it’s minor, with a clear reproduction and fix suggestion. Package your writeup nicely and publish it. That one project will teach you more than a month of passive watching. And you’ll have something concrete to show in interviews.
Interviewer: Last question. What’s your one-sentence philosophy for navigating cybersecurity—and yes, the dark web—with integrity?
Fabian: Curiosity with a seatbelt: learn boldly, test responsibly, document clearly, and use your skills to reduce harm rather than create it.
Interviewer: Thanks, Fabian.
Fabian: Thanks for having me—and for anyone reading: build your own lab, break your own stuff, and help fix the world’s.
