An editor has nominated this article for deletion. You are welcome to participate in the deletion discussion , which will decide whether or not to retain it. |
Alexander Heid | |
---|---|
Occupation(s) | Founder of HackMiami, Hacker |
Organization | HackMiami |
Alexander Heid is an American computer security consultant, white hat hacker, and business executive.
Heid is a co-founder of the South Florida hacker conference and hacker group known as HackMiami, [1] and previously served as the chief research officer and Fellow at the New York City information security firm SecurityScorecard from 2014 - 2024. [2]
Alexander Heid grew up in Miami, Florida and attended Barbara Goleman Senior High School. [3]
Alexander Heid founded HackMiami in 2008 along with co-founders James Ball and Rod Soto.
In 2010, Heid was credited as one of the first researchers who uncovered exploitable vulnerabilities within the Zeus (malware) botnet. [4]
Heid also served on the MGT Capital Investments Hacker Advisory Board, reporting directly to John McAfee. The Hacker Advisory Board consisted of other notable hackers such as Bryce Case aka YTCracker. [5]
Heid is documented as being one of the first researchers to attribute the Equifax data breach to a vulnerability in Apache Struts 2 within the first hours of the breach announcement during his tenure at SecurityScorecard. [6]
Prior to SecurityScorecard, Heid was the head of threat intelligence at Prolexic. Heid developed counterattack and neutralization methodologies against DDoS campaigns by discovering vulnerabilities in the attacker's botnet command and control servers. [7]
During his time at Prolexic, Heid was involved in the defense and mitigation of the Operation Ababil campaigns that were targeting the financial sector. [8] [9]
Additionally, Heid has held senior security roles within the banking industry, specializing in web application vulnerability analysis and botnet cyber threat intelligence. Heid has given multiple presentations at hacker conferences demonstrating exploitable vulnerabilities within crimeware applications that can be leveraged by white hat researchers for the purposes of attribution and threat neutralization.
Heid is also the author of the 2013 cryptocurrency threat intelligence report, "Analysis of the Cryptocurrency Marketplace," which was the first forensic report about malware threats relating to blockchain technologies. The report is ranked as one of the Top 1000 'Most Cited Blockchain Publications' by BlockchainLibrary. [10]
In computing, a denial-of-service attack is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to a network. Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled. The range of attacks varies widely, spanning from inundating a server with millions of requests to slow its performance, overwhelming a server with a substantial amount of invalid data, to submitting requests with an illegitimate IP address.
Linux malware includes viruses, Trojans, worms and other types of malware that affect the Linux family of operating systems. Linux, Unix and other Unix-like computer operating systems are generally regarded as very well-protected against, but not immune to, computer viruses.
In computing, a zombie is a computer connected to the Internet that has been compromised by a hacker via a computer virus, computer worm, or trojan horse program and can be used to perform malicious tasks under the remote direction of the hacker. Zombie computers often coordinate together in a botnet controlled by the hacker, and are used for activities such as spreading e-mail spam and launching distributed denial-of-service attacks against web servers. Most victims are unaware that their computers have become zombies. The concept is similar to the zombie of Haitian Voodoo folklore, which refers to a corpse resurrected by a sorcerer via magic and enslaved to the sorcerer's commands, having no free will of its own. A coordinated DDoS attack by multiple botnet machines also resembles a "zombie horde attack", as depicted in fictional zombie films.
A botnet is a group of Internet-connected devices, each of which runs one or more bots. Botnets can be used to perform distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, steal data, send spam, and allow the attacker to access the device and its connection. The owner can control the botnet using command and control (C&C) software. The word "botnet" is a portmanteau of the words "robot" and "network". The term is usually used with a negative or malicious connotation.
Crimeware is a class of malware designed specifically to automate cybercrime.
The Storm botnet or Storm worm botnet was a remotely controlled network of "zombie" computers that had been linked by the Storm Worm, a Trojan horse spread through e-mail spam. At its height in September 2007, the Storm botnet was running on anywhere from 1 million to 50 million computer systems, and accounted for 8% of all malware on Microsoft Windows computers. It was first identified around January 2007, having been distributed by email with subjects such as "230 dead as storm batters Europe," giving it its well-known name. The botnet began to decline in late 2007, and by mid-2008 had been reduced to infecting about 85,000 computers, far less than it had infected a year earlier.
Koobface is a network worm that attacks Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux platforms. This worm originally targeted users of networking websites like Facebook, Skype, Yahoo Messenger, and email websites such as GMail, Yahoo Mail, and AOL Mail. It also targets other networking websites, such as MySpace, Twitter, and it can infect other devices on the same local network. Technical support scammers also fraudulently claim to their intended victims that they have a Koobface infection on their computer by using fake popups and using built-in Windows programs.
Trellix is a privately held cybersecurity company that was founded in 2022. It has been involved in the detection and prevention of major cybersecurity attacks. It provides hardware, software, and services to investigate cybersecurity attacks, protect against malicious software, and analyze IT security risks.
H*Commerce: The Business of Hacking You is a six-part online documentary film series directed by Seth Gordon. It centers on the struggle between criminal hackers and security experts. Each segment is between five and eight minutes in length. The first was released on the Internet on May 20, 2009.
HackMiami is a formal organization of information security professionals who host the annual international hacker conference that takes place in Miami Beach, FL known as the 'HackMiami Conference.'
Dorkbot is a family of malware worms that spreads through instant messaging, USB drives, websites or social media channels like Facebook. It originated in 2015 and infected systems were variously used to send spam, participate in DDoS attacks, or harvest users' credentials.
Lazarus Group is a hacker group made up of an unknown number of individuals, alleged to be run by the government of North Korea. While not much is known about the Lazarus Group, researchers have attributed many cyberattacks to them since 2010. Originally a criminal group, the group has now been designated as an advanced persistent threat due to intended nature, threat, and wide array of methods used when conducting an operation. Names given by cybersecurity organizations include Hidden Cobra and ZINC or Diamond Sleet. According to North Korean defector Kim Kuk-song, the unit is internally known in North Korea as 414 Liaison Office.
BASHLITE is malware which infects Linux systems in order to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS). Originally it was also known under the name Bashdoor, but this term now refers to the exploit method used by the malware. It has been used to launch attacks of up to 400 Gbps.
Mirai is malware that turns networked devices running Linux into remotely controlled bots that can be used as part of a botnet in large-scale network attacks. It primarily targets online consumer devices such as IP cameras and home routers. The Mirai botnet was first found in August 2016 by MalwareMustDie, a white hat malware research group, and has been used in some of the largest and most disruptive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, including an attack on 20 September 2016 on computer security journalist Brian Krebs' website, an attack on French web host OVH, and the October 2016 DDoS attacks on Dyn. According to a chat log between Anna-senpai and Robert Coelho, Mirai was named after the 2011 TV anime series Mirai Nikki.
MalwareMustDie, NPO is a whitehat security research workgroup that was launched in August 2012. MalwareMustDie is a registered nonprofit organization as a medium for IT professionals and security researchers gathered to form a work flow to reduce malware infection in the internet. The group is known for their malware analysis blog. They have a list of Linux malware research and botnet analysis that they have completed. The team communicates information about malware in general and advocates for better detection for Linux malware.
Hajime is a malware which appears to be similar to the Wifatch malware in that it appears to attempt to secure devices. Hajime is also far more advanced than Mirai, according to various researchers.
The Zealot Campaign is a cryptocurrency mining malware collected from a series of stolen National Security Agency (NSA) exploits, released by the Shadow Brokers group on both Windows and Linux machines to mine cryptocurrency, specifically Monero. Discovered in December 2017, these exploits appeared in the Zealot suite include EternalBlue, EternalSynergy, and Apache Struts Jakarta Multipart Parser attack exploit, or CVE-2017-5638. The other notable exploit within the Zealot vulnerabilities includes vulnerability CVE-2017-9822, known as DotNetNuke (DNN) which exploits a content management system so that the user can install a Monero miner software. An estimated USD $8,500 of Monero having been mined on a single targeted computer. The campaign was discovered and studied extensively by F5 Networks in December 2017.
A web shell is a shell-like interface that enables a web server to be remotely accessed, often for the purposes of cyberattacks. A web shell is unique in that a web browser is used to interact with it.
Cryptojacking is the act of exploiting a computer to mine cryptocurrencies, often through websites, against the user's will or while the user is unaware. One notable piece of software used for cryptojacking was Coinhive, which was used in over two-thirds of cryptojacks before its March 2019 shutdown. The cryptocurrencies mined the most often are privacy coins—coins with hidden transaction histories—such as Monero and Zcash.