Gordon Lyon
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| Gordon Lyon | |
|---|---|
Lyon in San Francisco, California
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| Residence | Palo Alto, California |
| Other names | Fyodor Vaskovich |
| Known for | Nmap |
| Website | http://insecure.org/fyodor/ |
Gordon Lyon (also known by his pseudonym Fyodor Vaskovich) is a network security expert, open source programmer, writer, and a hacker. He authored the open source Nmap Security Scanner and numerous books, web sites, and technical papers focusing on network security. Lyon is a founding member of the Honeynet Project and Vice President of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.
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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. He lives in Palo Alto, California.
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[1][2] and software offered by original authors; the accusations included deception as well as copyright and trademark violation.[2]
Lyon has lost control of the Nmap Sourceforge page, with Sourceforge taking over the project's page and offering adware wrapped download bundles.[3][4]
Web sites
Lyon maintains several network security web sites:
- Nmap.Org — Documents the Nmap Security Scanner and provides it for download.
- 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.
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.
