Tribe of Hackers

22Ben Donnelly

“There’s plenty of money in the world, and if that’s all it took, we would have fixed cybersecurity long ago.”

Twitter: @Zaeyx

Ben has worked as a penetration tester, as a security researcher/consultant, and as the founder of Promethean Info Sec. Previously, he served as the lead developer on the DARPA-funded Active Defense Harbinger Distribution. He is also the inventor of the Ball and Chain cryptosystem and the creator of TALOS Active Defense, as well as a host of other information security tools and methodologies. Ben has assisted in the creation of content for a number of SANS courses and is a co-author of the book Offensive Countermeasures: The Art of Active Defense. He has worked on teams hacking such things as entire states, power plants, multinationals, and prisons. He has competed in and won a variety of InfoSec competitions, including SANS NetWars. Ben has also legally hacked the Pentagon. He has presented on his own original research at DerbyCon as well as BSides Boise.

If there is one myth that you could debunk in cybersecurity, what would it be?

That the preeminent contemporary problems of the field are intractable. From years of struggling with the same issues again and again, with seemingly no end in sight, a majority of the professionals in our field have thrown in the philosophical towel. I can’t count how many times I’ve talked to highly ...