In October, I attended a couple events at work as part of National Cybersecurity Awareness Month. One such event was a webinar to hear a local author speak about his latest book, along with a chance to win a signed copy of his book. I registered for the webinar, but unfortunately, something came up and I couldn’t attend. Later that day, however, I got the following email:

The signed book landed in my inbox a few days later. How could I have won without having attended? Could it be that I “hacked” the system?

Then a few days after I got the book, I got a notification from WordPress telling me that my blog had earned 1,337 total likes. It may look like an odd number, but it’s not random. This number represents the letters l-e-e-t, which is leetspeak for elite. Woo-hoo (w00t)!

[Cue Twilight Zone music]

Do you know who is credited with coining the term leetspeak? None other than The Cult of the Dead Cow – the subject and title of the book I had won!

On page 40 of his book, Joseph Menn writes, “…leet speak (is) the joking ‘elite’ language of hackers.”

According to the Netlingo website, “Leetspeak (a.k.a. leet, lite, elite, eleet, 1337, 3l337, l33t, 3l33t) or ‘leet’ for short, is a type of online jargon in which a computer user replaces regular letters with other keyboard characters to form words phonetically.”

So with that, I’d like to say:

7h4Nk U f0R 4ll 0f ur l1k32 (Thank you for all of your likes)!

I appreciate all of your comments, too, so when you read this, type “w00t” in the comments below!