ROBERT HANSEN

• Silicon Alchemy
  While at Silicon Alchemy where he was the Chief Operations Officer, RSnake worked with Bronc Buster on architectural designs for software called Peekabooty, which was a precursor to Tor (network).[3]
  
  RSnake also gave his first public speech at the Black Hat Briefings in Las Vegas, NV in 2001 on the hardening of .htaccess files based on his experiences identifying and thwarting automated brute force attacks.[8]

 

• Cable & Wireless America
  RSnake joined Digital Island which was merged with Exodus Communication and eventually turned into Cable & Wireless America. He began his career at the company as a programmer and left after being promoted to product manager. While at Cable & Wireless America, RSnake worked with Jeremiah Grossman to create intranet port hacking - a technique by which the browser's internal access to a network is a conduit for malicious HTML and JavaScript to attack internal resources.[9] [10]

 

• EBay Inc
  RSnake was the Sr. Global Product Manager of Trust and Safety at eBay. During his time there, he invented the idea of Content Security Policy as a means to defeat stored and reflected cross-site scripting. During his tenure at eBay RSnake founded ha.ckers.org, a hacker-centric web application security lab and blog and sla.ckers.org, a forum for web application security experts.

 

• Realtor.com/Move
  RSnake was the director of product management for Realtor.com/Move Inc in charge of various systems, like mapping. It is where RSnake began blogging on ha.ckers.org, after having left eBay.

 

• SecTheory In 2007
  RSnake co-founded SecTheory LLC and shortly thereafter moved to Austin, Texas where he continued doing Internet security research while consulting.[36] He began by attacking the authentication system at Acutrust using entropy attacks.[11]. The XSS cheatsheet was built to evade filters that might prevent attackers from injecting Cross-Site Scripting. [12]
  
  In 2008 Tom Stracener and RSnake co-presented at the DEF CON security conference in Las Vegas, NV on the topic of "Xploiting Google Gadgets: Gmalware and Beyond". [23][44] The attack used malicious Google Gadgets to phish users and leak sensitive information. After this talk RSnake joined the Black Hat Briefings speaker review board. [24]
  
  RSnake worked on two DNS-related projects: DNS rebinding research[13] and the Fierce DNS enumeration tool which was capable of using brute force enumeration to identify assets of a target domain in 2009. [14] Adding to the groundswell of intranet port scanning research, RSnake introduced the concept of RFC1918 cache poisoning, which used the browser's cache and overlapping RFC1918 space to compromise networks that an adversary would not normally have access to.[15][35]
  
  RSnake built a denial of service tool called Slowloris (computer security) which used partially complete HTTP requests in parallel to deny service to Apache websites. Slowloris was used during the 2009 Iranian presidential election protests to take down leadership websites.[16]
  
  Shortly thereafter, RSnake and Jeremiah Grossman co-authored a new exploit class called Clickjacking (also sometimes referred to as Likejacking or UI redressing). The official presentation had to delay details of the exploit due to a request by Adobe to fix the vulnerability in Flash prior to public disclosure.[17] [18][37][38][39][40]
  
  RSnake and James Flom co-created Falling Rock Networks, which was a productized version of the ha.ckers.org's hardware and software stack which heavily utilized Berkeley Software Distribution Chroot jails.[19]
  
  In 2010 and during his time analyzing HTTPS, RSnake and Josh Sokol presented at the Black Hat Briefings a collection of two dozen HTTPS side-channel attacks in a presentation dubbed "HTTPS can Byte Me".[20] Shortly thereafter, in December 2010, RSnake wrote his 1000th blog post and officially ended his blogging on ha.ckers.org. [21] In 2012 RSnake, by way of SecTheory, was involved in the DFIR work after Anonymous hacked Stratfor.[22]
  
  While running SecTheory with RSnake, James Flom located a Carnivore (software) device in their network, which ultimately lead RSnake to filing a FOIA request. The CIA gave a Glomar response. [25] On RSnake's Facebook page, he said that the FBI on the other hand “said that my case file was 469 pages, of which they were going to delete 419 before they even sent it to me. That left 50 pages. Those 50 pages though, were just the boilerplate case file and every single page is 100% redacted.”
  
  SecTheory was officially handed over to James Flom in 2013 to run the company after the Subprime mortgage crisis which had a large financial impact on the consulting practice.[3][46]

 

• WhiteHat Security (now Synopsys)
  Jeremiah Grossman hired RSnake to be a director of product management at WhiteHat Security. RSnake was quickly promoted to the title of Vice President of Labs, where he helped launch Aviator, which was a short-lived privacy-focused alternative to Google Chrome built on Chromium.[26]
  
  During his tenure at WhiteHat, RSnake issued a warning about Anonymous having been compromised by nation states on VICE Cyberwar. [27] Subsequently, RSnake has explained how he knew that to be true in a conversation with Mike Jones on the H4unt3d Hacker podcast. [25]
  
  RSnake began to collect and compute magic hashes which allow adversaries to utilize collisions to break into web applications when certain types of numerics are used in comparison with existing hashes which collide with the numeric representation of zero.[28]
  
  In 2015 RSnake downloaded the North Korean Red Star OS and ran tests to identify issues with the Nanera browser, which lead to the understanding that the entirety of North Korea is using RFC1918 address space.[29]

 

• OutsideIntel/Bit Discovery/Tenable
  In 2018 Bit Discovery acquired RSnake's corporate intelligence platform, OutsideIntel. In 2021, RSnake created a new type of attack called NaN Injection within Python. [30] NaN refers to "Not a Number" which potentially allows an adversary to do many different dangerous things when injected into vulnerable Python code such as privilege escalation, denial of service, incorrect comparison operations, and more. The maintainers of Python via Redhat responded with, "Python is a fully featured programming language, it allows you to write all kinds of programs, including insecure ones." As such, Python remains vulnerable as there appears to be zero plans to fix NaN Injection, issue an associated CVE or author guidance to developers.
  
  On June 6th, 2022 Bit Discovery was acquired by Tenable Inc.[33][34] RSnake became the Deputy CTO managing the WAS and EASM programs for Tenable, after which he left on his 1 year anniversary.

 

• Civilized Entertainment
  In 2022 RSnake became an executive producer on the film "Lion Spy" featuring Rogue Rubin.[41]

 

• The RSnake Show
  In 2022, RSnake created and executive produced a podcast entitled "The RSnake Show" that was purported to be "important conversations with people in the know."
  
  He wrote the book AI's Best Friend which documents the intersection of human and AI/AGI hallucinations and the complexity of the alignment problem.

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• Grossman Ventures
  In 2024, RSnake became a Managing Director of Grossman Ventures - an information security focused early-stage VC.