Hi. I’m Stephen.

stephen | October 1st, 2008 | Filed Under: Uncategorized

Hi!

I am Stephen A. Ridley. I recently started here at Matasano as a Senior Researcher (working out of the Manhattan office). I studied Physics, but for work I do software reversing, protocol replication, and exploit development. Before Matasano, I was at McAfee as a Senior Security Architect, in a small (5 person) R&D group learning from all-stars like Mark Dowd, John Viega, and David Coffey. Prior to McAfee I was at Aegis Research (which became ManTech Security and Mission Assurance) supporting the U.S. Defense and Intelligence communities doing reversing and vuln research. I got the opportunity to do all kinds of other neat stuff there, but mostly I got to be batboy for all the grand slammers on that team.

Here at Matasano, I again find myself fortunate enough to be on another phat team. I (probably like most of you) came up following groups like Teso, #ADM, and antisec.is while getting amused by groups like b4b0, ~el8, and gob bles. Also, like many folks in this industry, my motivation tends to wax and wane, limboing between states of limerence and ‘jaded disillusionment’. (If you remember, for a while folks thought it was all over after ~2001…but here we are.)

While the game is definitely different now, there is still some inspiring stuff being done. Most recently some of the public discoveries and techniques I found to be pretty re-inspiring in different ways were:

Work like this serves as reminders that there is still a lot of unexplored landscape out there with plenty of good work waiting to be done regardless of how bleak the future might sometimes look for cool bugs. I look forward to “settling in” to work on some of the neat projects we have lined up here at Matasano and hopefully posting a bit here on the blog.

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