Peiter Zatko

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Peiter "Mudge" Zatko
Peiter Zatko at DARPA.jpg
Mudge during his tenure at DARPA
Born (1970-12-01) December 1, 1970 (age 53)
Alabama, U.S. [1]
Alma mater Berklee College of Music
Known for L0pht, L0phtcrack, DARPA Cyber Fast Track, testimony to the Senate, Cult of the Dead Cow
Awards Secretary of Defense Exceptional Civilian Service Award, Order of Thor
Scientific career
Fields Computer Science
Public administration
Hacker
Institutions Google, Motorola, DARPA, L0pht, Twitter

Peiter C. Zatko, better known as Mudge, is an American network security expert, open source programmer, writer, and hacker. He is currently the chief information officer of DARPA. [2] He was the most prominent member of the high-profile hacker think tank the L0pht [3] as well as the computer and culture hacking cooperative the Cult of the Dead Cow.

Contents

While involved with the L0pht, Mudge contributed to disclosure and education on information and security vulnerabilities. In addition to pioneering buffer overflow work, the security advisories he released contained early examples of flaws in the following areas: code injection, race condition, side-channel attack, exploitation of embedded systems, and cryptanalysis of commercial systems. He was the original author of the password cracking software L0phtCrack. [4]

In 2010, Mudge accepted a position as a program manager at DARPA where he oversaw cyber security research. [5] In 2013, Mudge went to work for Google in their Advanced Technology & Projects division. [6] [7] In 2020, he was hired as head of security at Twitter. [8] In 2023 he started working at the security consulting firm Rapid7 that develops Metasploit. [9]

Biography

Born in December 1970, Mudge graduated from the Berklee College of Music at the top of his class [10] and is an adept guitar player.

Mudge was responsible for early research into a type of security vulnerability known as the buffer overflow. In 1995 he published "How to Write Buffer Overflows", one of the first papers on the topic. [11] He published some of the first security advisories and research demonstrating early vulnerabilities in Unix such as code injection, side-channel attacks, and information leaks, and was a leader in the full disclosure movement. He was the initial author of security tools L0phtCrack, AntiSniff, and l0phtwatch. [12] [13]

Mudge was one of the first people from the hacker community to reach out and build relationships with government and industry. In demand as a public speaker, he spoke at hacker conferences such as DEF CON [14] and academic conferences such as USENIX. [15] Mudge has also been a member of Cult of the Dead Cow since 1996. [16] [12] He was one of the seven L0pht members who testified before a Senate committee in 1998 about the serious vulnerabilities of the Internet at that time. [17] The L0pht became the computer security consultancy @stake in 1999, and Mudge became the vice president of research and development and later chief scientist. [18] [19]

In 2000, after the first crippling Internet distributed denial-of-service attacks, he was invited to meet with President Bill Clinton at a security summit alongside cabinet members and industry executives. [20]

Career

In 2004 Zatko became a division scientist at government contractor BBN Technologies, [21] where he originally worked in the 1990s, and also joined the technical advisory board of NFR Security. [22] In 2010, it was announced that he would be project manager of a DARPA project focused on directing research in cyber security. [5] In 2013 he announced that he would leave DARPA for a position at Google ATAP. [7] [23] In 2015 Zatko announced on Twitter he would join a project called #CyberUL, a testing organisation for computer security inspired by Underwriters Laboratories, mandated by the White House. [24]

DARPA

At DARPA he created the Cyber Analytical Framework the agency used to evaluate DoD investments in offensive and defensive cyber security. During his tenure he ran at least three Department of Defense (DoD) programs known as Military Networking Protocol (MNP), Cyber-Insider Threat (CINDER), and Cyber Fast Track (CFT).

Military Networking Protocol (MNP) provided network prioritization with full user-level attribution for military computer networks. [25]

CINDER focused on identifying cyber espionage conducted by virtual insider threats such as future variants of Stuxnet or Duqu. CINDER is often mistakenly associated with WikiLeaks in the media. [26] [27] This is possibly due to the confusion between DARPA programs focused on identifying human insider threat such as ADAMS [28] and the identification of software espionage posed by malware in the CINDER program. [29] This issue was clarified by Mudge in his Defcon 2011 keynote at 46 minutes and 11 seconds into the talk. [30]

Cyber Fast Track (CFT) provided resources and funding to security research, including programs run by hackers, hackerspaces, and makerlabs. The program provided an alternative to traditional government contracting vehicles that was accessible to individuals and small companies previously unable to work within the cumbersome and complicated DARPA process. The novel contracting effort had an averaging time of 7 days from receipt of proposal to funding being provided to the proposing research organization. [31] The program was initially announced at Shmoocon during his 2011 keynote.

On August 7, 2024, he announced on X.com (Twitter) that he had returned to DARPA as part of the leadership team, as DARPA's Chief Information Officer (CIO). [2] [32] [33]

Twitter

Zatko was hired by Jack Dorsey  – Twitter's CEO – in November 2020 to lead the company's information security approach, after a July 2020 hack that compromised multiple high-profile accounts. [34] [35] He was terminated by the company in January 2022, [36] with Twitter claiming it was after "an assessment of how the organization was being led and the impact on top priority work".

On 23 August 2022, the contents of a whistleblower complaint made by Zatko to the United States Congress were published. [34] The complaint alleges Twitter committed multiple violations of United States securities regulations, the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914, and a 2011 enforceable consent decree reached with the Federal Trade Commission after several issues between 2007 and 2010. [37] He also accused Twitter of "extreme, egregious deficiencies" in its handling of user information and spam bots. [38] Zatko accused several Twitter executives, including Parag Agrawal and certain board members, of making false or misleading statements about privacy, security, and content moderation on the platform in violation of the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 and SEC disclosure rules. These included misrepresentations to Elon Musk made during the course of his acquisition bid, with the complaint specifically calling Agrawal's May 16 thread deceptive. [39] [40] [41] The Wall Street Journal reported that Twitter reached a confidential $7 million settlement with Zatko in June, following his firing. [42] The settlement prohibits Zatko from speaking publicly about his time at Twitter or disparaging the company, with the exception of Congressional hearings and governmental whistleblower complaints. [42] On 13 September 2022, Zatko testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. [43] [44]

Personal life

On 11 August 2007 he married Sarah Lieberman, a co-worker at BBN and former mathematician at the National Security Agency. Remarking about her husband’s time at Twitter in an article in Time Magazine, she said, "dishonesty is definitely something that frustrates him." [45]

Awards

Refereed papers

L0pht Security advisories and software

Mudge published numerous papers and advisories detailing security problems across different applications and operating systems and was a pioneering champion of full disclosure.

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References

  1. ↑ Lyngaas, Sean (24 August 2022). "Meet the former Twitter exec blowing the whistle on the company". CNN Business . Archived from the original on 31 August 2022. Retrieved 31 August 2022.
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  3. ↑ Security Scene Errata Archived 2 May 2005 at the Wayback Machine
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