Gordon Lyon

Gordon Lyon (also known by his pseudonym Fyodor Vaskovich) is a network security expert.[1] Lyon created Nmap, and has written numerous books, web sites, and technical papers about network security. He is a founding member of the Honeynet Project and was Vice President of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.

Gordon Lyon
Lyon in San Francisco, California
Born1977
Other namesFyodor Vaskovich
Known forNmap
Websitehttp://insecure.org/fyodor/

Personal life

Lyon has been active in the network security community since the mid-1990s. His handle, Fyodor, was taken from Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Most of his programming is done in the C, C++, and Perl programming languages.

Opposition to grayware

In December 2011 Lyon published his strong dislike of the way Download.com started bundling grayware with their installation managers and concerns over the bundled software, causing many people to spread the post on social networks, and a few dozen media reports. The main problem is the confusion between Download.com-offered content[2][3] and software offered by original authors; the accusations included deception as well as copyright and trademark violation.[3]

Lyon lost control of the Nmap Sourceforge page in 2015, with Sourceforge taking over the project's page and offering adware wrapped download bundles.[4][5] Currently (2019) the original Sourceforge page does no longer contain any files [6] but the Sourceforge "mirror" page [7] used to hijack the Nmap account redirects to the official https://nmap.org/ site now.

Web sites

Lyon maintains several network security web sites:

  • Nmap.Org – Host of the Nmap security scanner and its documentation
  • SecTools.Org – The top 100 network security tools (ranked by thousands of Nmap users)
  • SecLists.Org – Archive of the most common security mailing lists
  • Insecure.Org – His main site, offering security news/updates, exploit world archive, and other misc. security resources

Published books

Lyon has written and co-authored several books:

  • Know Your Enemy: Revealing the Security Tools, Tactics, and Motives of the Blackhat Community (Addison-Wesley, 2002, ISBN 0-201-74613-1), co-authored with other members of the Honeynet Project. A 2nd edition is now available (ISBN 0-321-16646-9), as are sample chapters.
  • Stealing the Network: How to Own a Continent (Syngress, 2004, ISBN 1-931836-05-1). Hacker fiction, but tries to stay realistic. Co-authored with Kevin Mitnick and other hackers. Gordon's chapter is freely available online.
  • Nmap Network Scanning (Nmap Project, 2008, ISBN 978-0-9799587-1-7)

Interviews

Public interviews with Lyon/Vaskovich have been posted by SecurityFocus, Slashdot, Zone-H, TuxJournal, Safemode, and Google. Many of these provide more personal details than his official bio page does.[8]

Conferences

Lyon attends and speaks at many security conferences. He has presented at DEFCON, CanSecWest, FOSDEM, IT Security World, Security Masters' Dojo, ShmooCon, IT-Defense, SFOBug, and others. [9]

See also

References
  1. John Leyden (2012-08-05). "Experts troll 'biggest security mag in the world' with DICKish submission". The Register.
  2. Brian Krebs (2011-12-06). "Download.com Bundling Toolbars, Trojans?". Krebs on security. Retrieved 2015-05-04.
  3. Gordon Lyon (2012-06-27). "Download.com Caught Adding Malware to Nmap & Other Software". Retrieved 2015-05-04. we suggest avoiding CNET Download.com entirely
  4. "Sourceforge Hijacks the Nmap Sourceforge Account". Seclists.org. 3 June 2015.
  5. Sean Gallagher (4 June 2015). "Black "mirror": SourceForge has now seized Nmap audit tool project". Ars Technica.
  6. "Sourceforge Nmap page". 24 May 2019.
  7. "Sourceforge Nmap mirror page". 24 May 2019.
  8. "Fyodor Answers Your Network Security Questions". Slashdot.
  9. "DEF CON 13 - Fyodor, Hacking Nmap". Defcon Youtube Channel.
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