Authentic Hacker Culture: Didier Stevens
Didier Stevens is a famous Belgian software developer and a respected cybersecurity word wide expert . He is best known for his tools for
cracking Windows passwords, analyzing PDF documents and
injection malicious code into PDF file, and as the author of the open-source
Didier Stevens Suite utilities: 140 programs for system operations with files, processes, the registry and other things.
As his LinkedIn profile says,
Didier Stevens "started programming over 40 years ago and has no plans to stop." Since the 80s, he
has been into hacker stuff, namely
reverse engineering malware. In fact, he still does it to this day. If you have an interesting sample, you can send it to him by email. Didier's official career began in 1991 with the Belgian provider Belgacom, then there were Euroclear and IP Globalnet, from 2000 to 2016 he worked as a security consultant at Microsoft, first as a freelancer, and then as a
Microsoft MVP for user security.
In 2012, he founded
Didier Stevens Labs, which is still active. He probably provides consulting services from this legal entity at a price several times higher than what he would pay an individual contractor. As they say, every good programmer should have his own company for such cases. In recent years, he has been running a private business, while holding the positions of senior handler at the
Internet Storm Center (ISC) of the SANS Institute of Technology and
senior analyst at NVISO, a company that deals with information security and protection against cyberattacks.
Information security specialists may have come across the mention of the open source Didier Stevens Suite utilities, which contains
140 small programs. Here are some:
📌
Ariad: a tool (driver) to block code execution after inserting a USB flash drive into a port,
base64dump: extract base64 strings from a file,
📌
BinaryTools: simple tools for binary operations: reverse (inverts a file) and middle (extracts a sequence),
📌
bpmtk: a set of tools for manipulating basic processes,
📌
BruteForceEnigma: a program for brute-forcing Enigma ciphers,
📌
cipher-tool: encoding and decoding texts with simple ciphers,
📌
cmd-dll: converting cmd.exe (ReactOS) to dll,
📌
CounterHeapSpray: a tool for ensuring process security: monitors the memory usage of an application to protect against heap spraying,
The case of the Didier Stevens shows that the career of a cool professional can start with innocent hacker joke. As your skills and serious attitude to the matter grow, you become a
"leading information security specialist" who is hired as a consultant by leading corporations and invited to speak at conferences.
See also:
NVISO Lab
X(Twitter)
Black Hat 2014