Vulnerability hunting on network devices has long been an arcane, occult art-form owing to squamous hardware, strange software, and operating systems that seem to defy both logic and good software development practices. The challenges are great, but the allure of binding such strategically placed devices to your will is strong. This talk will walk you through building an effective toolset to explore and exploit these network devices, by getting into their very essence, debugging them and using the latest in freely available tools and some very low cost hardware.