Gordon Lyon (also known by his pseudonym Fyodor Vaskovich) is an American
network security expert, creator of
Nmap and writer of books, websites, and technical papers about network security. He is a founding member of the
Honeynet Project and was Vice President of
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.
Personal life
Lyon has been active in the network security community since the mid-1990s. His handle, "Fyodor", was taken from Russian author
Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
Most of his programming is done in the
C,
C++, and
Perl
Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offic ...
programming languages.
Opposition to grayware
In December 2011, Lyon published his strong dislike of the way
Download.com started bundling
grayware with their installation managers and concerns over the bundled software, causing many people to spread the post on social networks, and a few dozen media reports. The main problem is the confusion between Download.com-offered content
and software offered by original authors; the accusations included deception as well as copyright and trademark violation.
Lyon lost control of the
Nmap SourceForge
SourceForge is a web service that offers software consumers a centralized online location to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software. It provides source code repository hosting, bug tracking, mirroring ...
page in 2015, with Sourceforge taking over the project's page and offering
adware
Adware, often called advertising-supported software by its developers, is software that generates revenue for its developer by automatically generating online advertisements in the user interface of the software or on a screen presented to the ...
wrapped download bundles. The original SourceForge page no longer contains any files and the Sourceforge "mirror" page used to hijack the Nmap account redirects to the official https://nmap.org/.
Websites
Lyon maintains several network security web sites:
* Nmap.Org – Host of the
Nmap security scanner and its documentation
* SecTools.Org – The top 100 network security tools (ranked by thousands of Nmap users)
* SecLists.Org – Archive of the most common security mailing lists
* Insecure.Org – His main site, offering security news/updates, exploit world archive, and other misc. security resources
Published books
Lyon has written and co-authored several books:
* ''Know Your Enemy: Revealing the Security Tools, Tactics, and Motives of the Blackhat Community'', co-authored with other members of the
Honeynet Project. A 2nd edition is now available, as ar
sample chapters
* ''Stealing the Network: How to Own a Continent''. Hacker fiction, but tries to stay realistic. Co-authored with
Kevin Mitnick and other hackers. Gordon's chapter i
freely available online
* ''Nmap Network Scanning''
Interviews
Public interviews with Lyon/Vaskovich have been posted by SecurityFocus, Slashdot, Zone-H, TuxJournal, Safemode, and Google. Many of these provide more personal details than his official bio page does.
Conferences
Lyon attends and speaks at many security conferences. He has presented at
DEFCON, CanSecWest,
FOSDEM
Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) is a non-commercial, volunteer-organized European event centered on free and open-source software development. It is aimed at developers and anyone interested in the free and ...
, IT Security World, Security Masters' Dojo,
ShmooCon
ShmooCon is an American hacker convention organized by The Shmoo Group. There are typically 40 different talks and presentations on a variety of subjects related to computer security and cyberculture. Multiple events are held at the convention ...
, IT-Defense, SFOBug, and others.
See also
*
W00w00
w00w00 (pronounced whoo-whoo) was a computer security think tank founded in 1996 and still active until the early 2000s. Although this group was not well known outside Information security circles, its participants have spawned more than a dozen ...
References
External links
Home page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lyon, Gordon
Living people
Writers about computer security
American computer programmers
Free software programmers
American technology writers
Writers from California
1977 births