Paul Baccas is a researcher at Sophos plc, the UK security company. After reading Engineering Science at Exeter College, Oxford, he worked in various technical roles at Sophos, and is now mainly engaged in spam research. He is a frequent contributor to Virus Bulletin. Kevin Finisterre is the former Head of Research and Co-founder of SNOSoft, Inc. aka Secure Network Operations. Kevin''s primary focus has been on the dissemination of information relating to the identification and exploitation of software vulnerabilities on various platforms. Apple, IBM, SAP, Oracle, Symantec, and HP are among many vendors that have had problems that were identified by Kevin. Kevin is currently very active in the Apple research and exploitation scene.
He enjoys testing the limits and is constantly dedicated to thinking outside the box. His current brainchild is the project he calls DigitalMunition.com. Larry H. has been doing security research on the Macintosh platform for over 2 years (since mid 2006), with strong focus on kernel land security and implementation of proactive defense mechanisms for both Linux and the XNU kernel. Even though computers aren''t his main occupation, he enjoys developing new and improving existent exploitation and IDS evasion techniques, as well as researching on secure OS design, security policy frameworks (MAC, RBAC, MLS, etc) and applied data mining. Even though this all sounds pretty serious, he enjoys humor for the banter as well as reading through the King James Bible quite frequently. David Harley has been researching and writing about malicious software and other security issues since the end of the 1980s.
From 2001 to 2006 he worked in the UK''s National Health Service as a National Infrastructure Security Manager, where he specialized in the management of malicious software and all forms of email abuse, as well as running the Threat Assessment Centre, and has worked since as an independent author and consultant for Small Blue-Green World. He joined ESET''s Research team in January 2008. He was co-author of Viruses Revealed (McGraw-Hill) and lead author and technical editor of The AVIEN Malware Defense Guide for the Enterprise (Syngress), as well as a contributor to Botnets: the Killer Web App (Syngress). He has contributed chapters to many other books on security and education for publishers such as Wiley, Pearson and Vieweg, as well as a multitude of specialist articles and conference papers. In his copious free time he is Chief Operations Officer for AVIEN (the Anti-Virus Information Exchange Network) and administers the MAC Virus web site. Gary Porteous is a Professional Security Researcher based in the UK and a keen advocate of open source projects. A hacker in the old sense of the word, as someone who creatively dissects and reconstructs technology, Gary feels both at home tinkering with small finite problem solving as considering the pattern of modern technology and it''s larger implications. Having been involved with Macintosh security since 1998, more recently he has worked as a systems engineer and consultant, and is currently employed as a Macintosh computer expert in the UK educational sector.
Alongside all this he enjoys escaping to the countryside whenever possible and helping to run the organization AppleseedUK (www.appleseeduk.org). Chris Hurley is a Senior Penetration Tester in the Washington, DC area. He has more than 10 years of experience performing penetration testing, vulnerability assessments, and general INFOSEC grunt work. He is the founder of the WorldWide WarDrive, a four-year project to assess the security posture of wireless networks deployed throughout the world. Chris was also the original organizer of the DEF CON WarDriving contest. He is the lead author of WarDriving: Drive, Detect, Defend (Syngress Publishing, ISBN: 19318360305).
He has contributed to several other Syngress publications, including Penetration Tester''s Open Source Toolkit (ISBN: 1-5974490210), Stealing the Network: How to Own an Identity (ISBN: 1597490067), InfoSec Career Hacking (ISBN: 1597490113), and OS X for Hackers at Heart (ISBN: 1597490407). He has a BS from Angelo State University in Computer Science and a whole bunch of certifications to make himself feel important. Johnny Long is a Christian by grace, a professional hacker by trade, a pirate by blood, a ninja in training, a security researcher and author. He can be found lurking at his website (http://johnny.ihackstuff.com). He is the founder of Hackers For Charity(http://ihackcharities.org), an organization that provides hackers with job experience while leveraging their skills for charities that need those skills.