Peiter Zatko
Peiter C. "Mudge" Zatko (born December 1, 1970 in Tuscaloosa) is a network security expert, open source software programmer, writer, hacker and whistleblower.
Zatko grew up in Tuscaloosa as the son of a chemistry professor at the University of Alabama. He became interested in computers as a child, tinkering with Apple IIs. He also excelled as a guitarist and graduated at the top of his class from the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts.
While in Boston, Zatko became involved in the L0pht Heavy Industries hacker collective. He published an early paper on exploiting buffer overflow vulnerabilities in 1995 and also issued research and security advisories for Unix operating systems. He was a co-author of the L0phtCrack, AntiSniff and L0pht-watch security tools. In the late 1990s he worked for the federal contractor BBN Technologies.
As a prominent voice for "white hat" hackers and for "full disclosure" of discovered vulnerabilities, Zatko was a frequent speaker and panelist at hacker conferences organized by government, industry and academic sponsors. In May 1998 he and six other L0pht members testified about internet vulnerabilities before the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs. Zatko served as vice president of research and development and later chief scientist of @stake, which acquired L0pht in 1999. In 2000, following a first wave of damaging distributed denial-of-service attacks, he participated in a security summit convened by President Bill Clinton.
In 2004 Zatko rejoined BBN as a division scientist. In 2007 he married mathematician Sarah Lieberman, who came to BBN from the National Security Agency. In 2010 he joined the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a project manager for cyber security research. He created the Cyber Analytical Framework used to evaluate DoD investments in offensive and defensive cyber security and ran the Military Networking Protocol (MNP), Cyber-Insider Threat (CINDER), and Cyber Fast Track (CFT) programs.
Zatko left DARPA for a position at Google's Advanced Technology & Projects division in 2013. In 2015 he joined #CyberUL, an organization launched to fill the need for White House-mandated security testing.
References
- Lyngaas, Sean (August 24, 2022) "Meet the former Twitter exec blowing the whistle on the company." CNN.com
- "Peiter Zatko" (August 30, 2022) Wikipedia - accessed August 30, 2022