Brian was what you may have called the muscle for awhile. Then he managed to find a mission where he got to mug some nice weapon shop where he found a +3 Axe of Hacking. Another thing you may have called Brian was slow, but he had read the Attributes and remembered something about Smarts letting you hack anything. Now anyone who had two braincells could tell you an axe hacking something and computer hacking are two separate things, but thanks to some dumb coding in this game reality... The two were actually one and the same. The Axe of Hacking lowers the defense of whatever you are hacking so if used on a computer it would make it easier to hack into... Presuming the computer isn't just destroyed, but after he learned where to hit the computers he was able to hack into systems relatively easily considering Brian was a bit of an idiot. The more interesting things came from his Smart perks to hacking. Perks that let him change certain features or qualities in the things he hacked. While it's an extremely useful skill in computer hacking that most hackers used his +3 Axe of Hacking let him use it differently.
Once his Axe had embedded itself into someone he had effectively "Hacked into them" which unlike most hackers who could do nothing against a flesh and blood character gave him some options to mess around with. Thanks to the whole PvP thing Brian hasn't had a chance to use it against a PC, but against NPCs it let him edit some of their personality and even physical values. The most useful thing for Brian being to lower their hp so that they'd be dead with the axe attack he just used, but one thing stirring in the back of his head was that he could probably edit their characters a little. Maybe he could change their physicality, age, gender, or maybe he could grant them player abilities? It was just a stirring in his head though, Brian wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed.