Interview with Dan Farmer

I first met Dan Farmer during DEFCON 1, where I thought he had the most useful and interesting presentation there. I had heard of Dan because he had written COPS, a very early, if not the earliest, vulnerability scanner. I kept encountering Dan over the years at various USENIX conferences as he continued to write tools, papers, and work on improving Internet and *nix security. I also met Wietse Venema for the first time when Wietse and Dan were presenting their forensic toolkit in 1999 [1].

Dan has often appeared in the limelight, partly because he feels so strongly about the general lack of security, but also out of a deep sense of ethics (and contrariness) that has guided his life, often at the expense of his career.