Portrait triangulated

Dave Dittrich (@davedittrich)

Status

Security Researcher, Consultant, Author

Motto

Dealing with the Advanced Persistent Threat since before it was even a thing.


If you spend more on coffee than on IT security, then you will be hacked. What’s more, you deserve to be hacked.

—Richard Clarke, Former Special Advisor to the President on Cybersecurity, RSA 2002

In the information economy, failing to maintain an informed view of the level of cyber-threat will soon be an un-sustainable risk for board level decision makers. The potentially high impact of individual and cumulative cyber-attacks means that the threat has become the responsibility of Chief Executives and Boards of Directors, rather than specialist security and system staff.

—Information Sharing Advisory Council, Sharing is Protecting: A Review of Information Sharing, in partnership with the National Infrastructure Security Co-ordination Centre, 2003.

About me

Twitter word cloud courtesy of @wordnuvola

Twitter word could for @davedittrich (courtesy of @wordnuvola http://imgur.com/b0iTvUs)

I am a computer security researcher with a hacker mindset who applies and translates decades of acquired knowledge to serve others with expertise in other domains to help them build and operate more resilient businesses.

I spend my time trying to understand how bad people harm others over the internet, and finding ways to lessen the damage by the bad guys (on purpose) or the good guys (by accident). I do this as an applied computer security researcher, a consultant, an author, and a first-iteration entrepreneur. For years I have freely given away much of my knowledge and tools because I believe everyone has a responsibility for helping make the internet a safer place, but they need to learn how from those who have already figured it out.

My background is in computer programming and UNIX system administration on several platforms. I started working at the University of Washington in 1990 and from 1996 until 2003, I was the senior computer security incident response analyst and system/network security consultant for the UW. Since then, I have focused on research and development of tools/techniques dealing with advanced threats.

The Weber Guy, circa 1994

The Weber Guy, circa 1994

Many years ago, I also supported World Wide Web services including the initial prototype and subsequent support of UW’s original (now retired) Weber web service (and am the proud “father” of the Weber Guy).

I taught C&C Education & Training course R870: Unix System Administration - A Survival Course <http://web.archive.org/web/19981205134345/http://www.washington.edu/R870/> for about 10 years, then lead the team that developed the first course on Cyberterrorism for UW Educational Outreach and in Autumn 2003 co-taught the initial offering of the special topics course on Computer Security Incident Response INFO 498AA in the UW’s iSchool. <http://web.archive.org/web/20040302143953/http://courses.washington.edu/i498aa/Syllabus.htm>

I was a founding member, and currently serve as Chief Legal and Ethics Officer, of the Honeynet Project <https://www.honeynet.org/> as well as a long-standing member of Seattle’s Agora computer security group (until it ceased in 2019).

This home page is available at <https://davedittrich.github.io>, and my Honeynet Project blog is at <https://www.honeynet.org/blog/64>

Contents

Bio

A number of short- and long-form bios are available in the Biographical info section.

Contact

Email: dave.dittrich (at) gmail.com

PGP Key ID: 0xA751C80AD15EE079 (or via hkps://hkps.pool.sks-keyservers.net)

PGP Key fingerprint:

097B 4DCB BF16 E1D8 A06C  7512 A751 C80A D15E E079

The image on the title bar is of a summer sunset in Geneva, Switzerland, July 2013. Copyright © 2013 by David Dittrich, all rights reserved.