For as long as I can remember, I have identified with with my thinking, and being thought of, as a naturally extroverted, gregarious, outgoing person.
It wasn’t a conscious choice, it just happened somehow that I caught onto the facts that a) I did well at creating myself as the center of attention and b) that people who are noticeable are the ones who receive the affirmation and encouragement I wanted.
I remember a specific interaction I had as a very young person, as I began to withdraw in response to the pressures of significant dysfunction and tension in my home life. A no-doubt well-intentioned, somewhat concerned figure of authority and reverence to me, probably my Dad or one of my favorite teachers, took me aside and mentioned missing the bubbly me.
In that moment, I determined that the quiet, introspective me, wasn’t good enough. That being that person made the people I cared about hurt and worry, got me in trouble, and being available and seen was what was best for everyone. Through this and other observations, over time nurturing my fledgling ability to communicate my desires authentically and effectively was overlooked.
It is true: I have magnetic, charismatic social talents, and I do occasionally truly and fully enjoy going out into the world and sharing them. Coupled with my intuition and understanding of people, I’ve experienced amazing, even transformative social interactions that I highly value as part of the life I’ve lead, and I am certain I will again.
However, I have habitually, and with potentially misguided examination, met my more frequent tendencies toward solitude — though intense and from a deep place — with shame, and all too often with a vehement self inflicted emotional punishment.
In my teens, my deep desire for a quiet safety and security was under constant, incessant attack. Though eventually recognizing the wisdom in doing so, I left high school an angry, guarded, self-perceived social failure, even though I passed the equivalency exam with ease at the age of 15, immediately and very successfully joining the work force.
Due to many factors I spent years in an agonizing isolated depression, in pain, online; a constant pressurized stream of my fears, my weaknesses, and my disappointments lurching passionately from my mind into IRC channels full of people ready to commiserate and affirm my negative beliefs, which were carefully constructed to appear as though I thought they were completely and utterly right. And I probably did.
It took me until 27 years into my life to be able to say, compassionately and authentically, that I didn’t enjoy loud live music, crowds, and bars so packed I’d find myself having to scream in order to be heard speaking. Due to other facets of my personality as well as prioritizing social interaction, it was scary and incredibly hard to ask for the closer one on one and small group connections my soul was really seeking.
Until my 30′s I met the physical disturbances in my body, and the numerous emotional hurdles present in most of my preparation for social events, with blame and negativity. For years, I’d get churning nervous shits while preparing to go out, holding onto the promise of inhibition annihilation by way of drugs and alcohol to power through it.
I have often been assuming that those responses were just me being weak, and seen my anxiety an unnecessary obstacle, or worse, a fundamental psychological flaw. I have scorned myself for wanting to be alone, for wanting to hide, for wanting quiet around me, when I feel scared or threatened or off kilter or tired.
Self scorn, and more frequently now self-doubt, is still my first response toward wanting to be with myself, in many cases. It’s a long road back from it being nearly impossible to trust when I need to be alone, and when I am trying to withdraw to punish myself in silence. Over time, they had simply become the same thing.
As I’ve aged and learned more about how and why to be alone, I’ve started to embrace alone time, usually in the form of travel. For a long period of my young-adult life I forced myself to constantly value expressing connection over taking time for myself, in part for fearing that if I took that time my job/lover/friend/parent/insert-connection-of-value-here would be gone when I returned, and as such often undermined the limited time I had so boldly and bravely taken.
Boldly and bravely may even be an understatement. Even now that I am beginning to master recognizing my need for solitude in wilderness, and having felt the amazing freeing power in listening to that call, prioritizing it is still incredibly challenging. Over these last few months as I’ve been frantically struggling, I’ve known and even proclaimed to others repeatedly that I desperately need to get away for a while, even just a few days, and have yet to make it happen.
There are many, many pieces to this puzzle of worth, of connection, of belonging and feeling accepted, for every one. What this woman said helped me find another one of mine:
In health and otherwise, my introversion is where my revelations come from. It’s where the meaningful, impactful words I write, the ideas I share, and my awareness of the connection I feel with humanity comes from. It’s where my performances come form, it’s where the layers upon layers in my shows come from, it’s where the compulsion to create Vita Arts came from. It’s where my paintings, my music, and every self photograph I’ve used in this post comes from.
My introversion is the birthplace of my extroversion. It’s how I communicate with my soul.
“We celebrate the death of a crack addict because she could sing. This isn’t to persecute Whitney Houston. It’s to persecute us for persecuting all the other crack addicts who can’t sing. Think things through.” — Urban Samurai
Snuggled in bed next to a pretty dozing boy, adding some stuff to neevita after a long, cracked out, but enjoyable day. As the benedryl starts creeping in, I wind down closer to the glorious 10 hours of sleep I’m about to get, with the bathroom fan balancing out the upstairs TV sounds, and a Pandora ambient station whisping through my ears.
I liked this weekend, and I am looking forward to my dreams, my future, and tomorrow.
There’s this time in every significant relationship where things are simply dripping in awesome. Life is flowing through everything you do with one another, you stand stronger on your own, the layers you skillfully peel away together reveal excitement, reverence and possibility. The processes are as enjoyable as the outcomes and it’s impossible to not at least occasionally catch yourself wishing and hoping that you may have found a fountain of perpetual fairy tale bliss that may just never have to end.
And then someone fucks up. And shit gets real.
In the most recent case, that someone was me. I found this detail highly inconvenient. It’s usually not me, at least not the first significant trial, but regardless of when it happens, the first time I royally screw up signifies a very particular point in the everlasting, yet constantly progressing cycle that is my relationship with relationships. It signifies a very important and basic test, a subconscious impulse that demands verification: Is this thing real.
One side of a coin is not a real coin. Until you suffer challenge together, you don’t know the strength you may have in a bond. But until you’ve suffered the inevitable fallibility in the other person, until you know what that looks like, and how they handle themselves, and you, when it happens, you don’t know if that bond even truly exists. At least, I don’t. Or at least, some small hologram that periodically takes the wheel inside me doesn’t.
So, that happened. I fucked up and it broke us both open and we were awesome and authentic about it and continue to progress as individuals and as a couple because of it. I’m not proud of it but I’ve worked through the vast majority of my guilt regarding my actions and I continue to learn a little bit more every few days.
I demand integrity and truthfulness and breadth in my significant interpersonal experiences. But real, as much as I covet and search for and insist upon it, is god damn fucking scary. She wants you to fail that test. She wants to stay right, to have (job) security, to stay alive, to keep doing what she knows and does so well it’s almost sickening: Protecting the rest of me. And she’s incessant, she’s crafty and wise and skeptical, she’s righteous and wants to be right because her being right inevitably means less hurt.
And that’s who bursting the bubble makes real, inside, for me. That’s when the shadows step in. That’s when insecurity starts nipping away at my confidence, when I start periodically shutting down emotionally and not knowing why, when I become ambivalent and oscillate between intense attachment and wanting the fuck out. Cause once it’s real, I have something to lose. Something else to invest in, give myself to, protect and foster and fight for, and fucking lose. And that just fucks up everything. She’s on. She’s fucking AWAKE. And it permeates everything in my life. I periodically want to leave my job, stop teaching aerial, give up music, get rid of all my shit, and disappear. Travel light. Travel light, and survive.
I used to think it was all guilt. Once I stepped out of my integrity with someone, and treated them poorly in some way, the guilt ate my resolve away. I thought I felt muted and inconsistent because I deserved to for whatever it was I did, whatever thing I inflicted in my fucked up gauntlet I make the people close to me run. And I could imagine all kinds of things, even things that I hadn’t even done yet and may never do, that made me a bad person and a bad partner who was better off, and made others better off, alone.
As well as I’m able to see this stuff in a relatively short timeframe, I’m still blindsided the test. It wouldn’t be a subconscious thing if I wasn’t, but god damn it if I don’t feel like I should see it coming. I’ve figured out that I feel muted and inconsistent afterwards because I’m threatened somehow, but knowing that doesn’t make it feel any less natural when it happens. I’m just being me, and everything feels fine. Monosaturated, but fine.
I finally saw her today. She’s about 12, with long, stringy, dirty blond hair. She’s wet, and cold, and dirty, standing inside a stone cave, Indiana Jones style. She’s holding something, like a torch or a specter, stationed outside a huge, heavy door. She’s collected, logical, matter of fact and appears unphasable, but there’s a look in her face that tells you she’ll tear your jaw off with her teeth if you step sideways at her too quickly. She radiates old soul, intimidation, and is undeniably smarter than you.
She’s the part of me that mama bears. She’s the one who stands up for the people around her because no one stood up for her. She’s the child that was so impressively mature. She’s constantly tense, constantly on guard. She’s intense and serious. She doesn’t sleep. She’s defined by her duty and by what lies behind that door. She’s the one who understands that there’s always a motive for someone to attack and try to steal what she’s charged to protect. She’s wrung out and full of endurance at the same time. She’s emotionally muted because she has to concentrate, obsessed with finding a breaking point and getting rid of you. And she has no fucking idea what it is she’s guarding.
All the time I’ve known about this test, from the first “I’ll try to run eventually” warning I gave to this last “Aww, man, not again — What the fuck did I do that for?!”, I thought it was about the staying. It’s always been about the staying.
Can they? Will they? Now? What about now? Oop, apparently it was time to test again, agh, I’m such a jerk. What, you’re still here? Really? Why? Sheesh, you’re fucking stupid. Again! Again again! .. This is boring. You know what, just.. nevermind.
The test is never satisfied because it’s not about the staying. I want it to be that easy, and for a long time I’ve stayed in some version of this corrosive loop where the all-telling test us supposed to solve everything and prove I’m capable of becoming comfortable being close with someone, if I just run it one. More. Time.
But it’s not. It’s about all the other shit that comes after the staying. All that scary shit I actually want.
And it’s all behind that door.
Another ingenious, beautiful, incredibly effective, creative, awe inspiring, bulldog stubborn, self inflicted fucking masterpiece of a booby trap.
*opens eyes halfway*
…
*realizes I’m topless, curled up on a tiny leather couch, with boys cargo shorts as a blanket*
…
*rolls over and goes back to a painful, hung over sleep*
..it’s almost noon and I’m pretty sure I’m still drunk.
One mild day quite a few years ago, I was walking downtown behind a clearly deshevled/homeless person. As I was behind him, he shat himself. Putrid liquid flowed down his pants and into his shoe, and as he shuffled along he began futilely wiping and flicking at it between steps. The smell was utterly horrid.
It’s historically been equally as common for me to go the route of disdain for a strangers intense weakness as it has for me to stop and help people, but that day, I pretty much just hated everyone. I’d decided in my mind that he was clearly at fault somehow. Lazy drug user who lost his give a shit, something along those lines. I was so above that.
In part because I’ve embraced much more of my nurturing and helpful nature since those days, and in part because I’m fucking sick and spewing out my ass and without my wits, a convenient toilet, a home to rest in, and some folded toilet paper, I could easily have been that poor guy these last two days — If I had that day to do over again, I would have stopped and helped him, even if that help was just a touch on the shoulder and empathy in my eyes. I would have treated him like he was a human being who needed help and someone to care about him.
How much of a difference could that have made in his life? I’ll never even have the slightest idea, now.
Just remembered that I slept in the bathtub last night. I recall waking up twice to a cold bath, turning on the hot water to warm up, and falling back to sleep. Yeaaaah. Tequila.
*sigh* Man.. this is probably going to be kind of a ramble..
“Courtnee Papastathis has performed as Zita the Aerialist since 2005. During
that time her focus has been to tell compelling stories through her aerial
performances. The act you just saw was an illustration of the struggle to
shed the defenses that bind us, finding strength in being vulnerable, and
how sex contributes to the art of self discovery. It’s also a really awesome
excuse to be naked.”
I was uncharacteristically nervous and emotionally raw before my first act, even for me at my most nervous I tend to get at this point in my career. I just couldn’t shake it. Performing, much as the rest of my life, brings an ebb and flow to things. Some days I’m calm as a cucumber, quietly beckoning the universe to bring it on.
Others, I have insecurity and doubt to deal with, or I’m worried about my body being hurt, or I’m highly invested in the emotional weight of the work I am presenting and going out there feels heavy, sometimes even scary.
Last night I had all of those things. It was potentially the last aerial performance I will do, and surely the last one I will do for a while. That was hard and sad and exhilarating at times, and it made for some emotional components to be present that I hadn’t gone through in a while.
I was also performing in an all aerial show, which can be harder on my self esteem and individualism than being the aerialist in a theater show. Even when I wasn’t looking, there were little things popping up, reminding me that I am just a drop of water in an endless sea. All the acts were very different, and all the acts were very good. We do what we do well and I am proud to be a part of such a high caliber production with such talented and creative people.
That said, some of these girls can do things I will never be able to do in less time than it took me to learn how to do a fucking hip lock – things I’ve wanted to do, tried to do and, depending on my perspective, failed at. In a way it can be hard to follow up someone who’s produced a rope act that embodied what I wanted to bring to rope the first 4 years of my aerial experience and never could.
On the flip side, what I bring to my work is unique and powerful, and I know that. In accepting my bodies abilities and limits, I’ve created the space to expose myself in a way that audiences rarely get to see and I am amazing at doing it. Maybe I can’t do open legged drops without wrecking my hips, and maybe my toes won’t splay the right way so I can do a toe climb, but god dammit when I am out there I own the living shit out of it. I own the living shit out of you.
The fact that I can’t even come close to doing the splits, that I don’t have a gymnastics or dance background and that I was a professional drug abuser in my youth rather than an athlete inspires and comforts my beginning aerial students. I have a triumphant and inspiring story to tell. That’s why I like teaching beginners – I want them to know that you don’t have to be a superhuman contortionist to be an aerial performer, and I want them to know that a lot earlier than I did.
Truly performing, for me, is taking people on a stirring emotional journey – along something that runs deep and strong in us as humans. Whether it’s my music, pretending to be a dancer or climbing things, that doesn’t change much. Sometimes I’ll put on a super cute outfit, hop up on a trapeze and practice while people are watching, and that’s really fun and fueling in its own right, but it’s not a true performance of mine. It’s not the meat and the heart of what I go out there for.
I brought that meat and heart and blood and guts and spit last night. People who had no idea of the health issues I am dealing with, or that I am potentially retiring from performing aerial, told me to keep doing what I’m doing with tears in their eyes. They told me it felt like an honor to be in the audience. They told me how inspired they were to create their own magic on a stage and share it. That’s the transformative power of the arts and it’s a beautiful thing that I feel grateful and privileged to have been able to cultivate for the last 5 years. Whatever comes after this, I’ll always carry that with me.
Stay tuned for more events. Maybe this is the time in my life where I learn to be graceful on the ground.
*sniffle*
(Thank you, John Cornicello, for the lovely images, and for allowing me to post produce them)
I feel fortunate and full today. I am going to DEFCON this year. I just received my itinerary from whitetras and it’s official. I’m bringing someone important to me to show him vegas for the first time.
I first went in 1995, when I was 15 and neck deep in linux, drugs and Marlboro Reds, and I’d recently discovered this thing called the web, and frequently picked fights about Slackware being superior to RedHat. I recall, during a recent move, finally throwing away my Slackware 2.7 CD which I had been keeping for posterity.
I went to defcon religiously for a time, my entire social network of people living inside a computer. I didn’t know most of their real names. I spent night after late night online tinkering, listening to music for the jilted generation (come to think of it, I think someone I talked to used ‘jilted’ as a handle..) and waiting for the next defcon, so I could see all these people in person again – and hardly remember most of it.
When I got a little older, I started playing with music, and joined mp3.com in 1997. The internet was still like the wild west and we were changing everything. My hacker friends helped me choose my juno 106 (thanks tfish) and hooked me up with equipment to make recording easier (tip of the hat to you whiteknight). After I created my first original song in 1999, on the floor of my living room, juno fresh out of its shipping box, paid for with my job breaking software at Microsoft, I started making a little money with CD sales and streams on mp3.com.
I was interviewed with ABCNews for an article on female hackers, and later about my music being online, based on a recommendation from Jeff Moss, assuring the reporter (Sascha, another person I’ve kept in touch with) I was definitely not a scene whore. I’m not sure how accurate that assurance was, but it sure felt good at the time. I still boast that Jeff pierced my navel, under mild duress in my studio apartment, sometime in 1999. That sounds pretty scene whorish to me, but who am I to say. Maybe we were just, you know.. friends.
Countless things have happened since my first defcon, and my introduction to the hacker community. My first website complete with a blue satin background and ripped off animated fire gifs was created in 1995, hosting a splattering of terrible teenage poetry. In 1997, Lars from the IRC channel #suicide sent me a black and white quickcam, and the neecam was put online, one of the first webcams during the era of Jennicam and Anacam, both of which were more popular, active and racy.
I’ve occasionally contemplated what my life would have been like had I never discovered the internet and been part of a revolution. I can’t fathom it. I can’t fathom how I could have possibly found another pool of socially awkward, skinny, pale, wide-eyed geniuses to have sloppy, dysfunctional teenage relationships with either. One of many reasons I am very thankful that my life turned out how it did.
I happened upon this awesome article about some of my friends. The L0pht is a fine example of what’s happened with this culture of misfits and criminals, but this is something that’s happened all over the landscape we built 10 years ago and long before that. I remember writing a rant about the difference between the hackers, my friends, and the script kids that were getting all the bad press, writing worms and breaking websites for attention. The hackers meant for what’s described in this article to happen from the beginning. They were out to change the world.
LOpht in Transition
04/01/2007
Michael Fitzgerald/CSO
Brian Oblivion. Kingpin. Mudge. Space Rogue. Stefan von Neumann. Tan. Weld Pond. That’s how the hacker group called the L0pht appeared before the Senate Subcommittee on Government Cybersecurity on May 19, 1998. They said, among other things, that they could take down the Internet in 30 minutes. The senators listened closely and afterward praised them effusively.
It was a landmark moment for hackers, shunned, derided and loathed by the technology industry. And it was a landmark for the L0pht too. Though the group was already known for its vulnerability disclosures, for the Hacker News Network, for tools like the hash cracking tool L0phtCrack, now “everybody [in the hacking community] wanted to be the L0pht,” remembers Jeff Moss, founder of the Black Hat and Defcon security conferences.
Not bad for a group that got its start when someone’s wife said it was time to get his computers out of the bathtub.
The L0pht shaped the way disclosures are handled and helped force vendors like Microsoft to change the way they address software security flaws. There’s no question, either, that by raising the visibility of security problems, the group spurred companies to begin paying more attention to security. “You knew you’d better rattle your own doorknobs before the hackers did,” says John Pescatore, a longtime information security analyst at Gartner.
Some think, though, that visibility has hurt software security. “They were the Led Zeppelin of gray hat hacking,” says Marcus Ranum, who is credited with creating the first commercial firewall product and is now CSO at Tenable Network Security. “By releasing gray hat tools and techniques they were able to get a tremendous amount of attention. And they opened the floodgates for all the bottom feeders that followed them.”
Ironically, it was Ranum himself who helped give the L0pht credibility. As CEO of NFR, which made software to find intruders on corporate networks, Ranum used the L0pht’s vulnerability research to strengthen his product, and hired the L0pht both to do a code review and to write modules for his product, giving the group a legitimate corporate client to tout. He says he considers the L0pht members his friends and says they are “great guys.” But he thinks those who have followed them find vulnerabilities almost as a way to blackmail corporations. He blames the L0pht, saying, “They have changed the industry for the worse.”
Nothing in the L0pht’s emergence from Boston’s bulletin board community in 1992 suggested it would achieve any more notoriety than other hacker collectives of the day. Brian Oblivion, a hacker with strong interests in radio communications, founded the group. Oblivion declined to be interviewed for this article, saying via Space Rogue that he was too busy. Chris Wysopal, who joined the L0pht in late 1992 as Weld Pond (a handle chosen by pointing at random at a map of the Boston area, because the bulletin board The Works forbade members to use real names), says that Oblivion “had so many computers in the bathroom that his wife couldn’t use it anymore.” She gave the group space in the South End artist’s loft where she made hats. And for several years, the L0pht was just a place for Oblivion and his friends to hang out after work and store their growing collection of computing equipment.
Among those friends were Space Rogue and a teenage hacker and skateboarder named Joe Grand, who went by the handle Kingpin (named for the bolt that runs through the truck, or axle, of a skateboard).
Grand calls from the road. He’s often on the road, literally—he is a triathlete good enough to have a sponsor. He’s 31 now and runs his own San Diego design shop, Grand Idea Studio, which has designed RFID and GPS modules for Parallax, an in-game videocamera for Gamecaster, and his best design yet, a video game accessory that he has licensed but can’t talk about.
Grand, an electrical engineer, has also written two books on hardware hacking and is a technical adviser to Make magazine. If all goes well with a pilot he’s recently shot, this fall we’ll see him on an engineering show on the Discovery Channel. Yet he’s nostalgic about the L0pht.
“I’m having a really hard time with realizing that I’m twice as old as when I joined the L0pht,” he says. “We did so many great things—what can I do to top that?”
The L0pht originally built a network so they could play Doom against each other. But they got more serious in 1994 and 1995, shedding some members and adding others with specific technical skills that complemented the group. They moved to a larger space in Watertown, Mass.
Excepting Grand, who was still in high school, all of the L0pht held various day jobs, often working together at places like CompUSA, Massachusetts General Hospital or BBN Technologies, the fabled research lab (Weld Pond, Brian Oblivion, Mudge and Silicosis all worked there at some point). They kept their identities hidden, in part to keep their day jobs. Everyone in the hacking community knew Dan Farmer had been fired from his job for releasing the Satan network analyzer. But the group wanted to turn the L0pht into a day job.
The charismatic, long-tressed Peiter “Mudge” Zatko had emerged as the group’s public face, if not its de facto leader. He developed, along with Wysopal, L0phtCrack, a tool that revealed weak passwords. Released in 1997, it’s still available on some websites today. “Back then, the companies would pretend [vulnerabilities] weren’t real,” says Bruce Schneier, the noted cryptographer and CTO of BT Counterpane. Schneier says the L0pht’s ability to build tools like L0phtCrack forced vendors to address security problems. “That’s the reason we have more secure software today. If it wasn’t for that, Microsoft would still be belittling, insulting and suing researchers,” he says.
By late 1998, the L0pht was actively trying to attract venture capital and turn itself into a real business—it had pushed out Stefan von Neumann and a couple of other short-lived members, and hired Christien Rioux (known as Dildog) and Paul Nash (known as Silicosis) to support L0phtCrack and do custom work for companies like NFR. The L0pht was not the first group of hackers to offer professional services or tools, but even in the giddy late 1990s, hackers still had an unsavory reputation. Finally, @stake, a security consulting firm, came to the group with $10 million in VC money and told the L0pht it could continue its research. The members voted to join it.
Even so, that merger, announced Jan. 10, 2000, marked the symbolic end of the L0pht. Over the next few years, its members were fired or drifted away, and @stake itself was gobbled up by Symantec in 2004. The only member of the L0pht still there is Nash. The transition was particularly difficult for Zatko, who spent six months on disability and left @stake after just two years.
Today, Zatko’s office at BBN is a rest area for sundry things. There’s a dead computer on a chair, and a working circa-1940s polygraph machine on a table. In a corner are two fishing rods and an antenna, part of an impromptu communications experiment. There’s a guitar signed by one-time porn stars Barbara Dare and Jamie Summers. A bound copy of the L0pht’s testimony in front of the Senate is on a shelf. On one wall hangs a picture of him with President Bill Clinton and Vinton Cerf, in which Zatko’s light brown hair is still rock-star length. It’s short now, parted in the middle. He has a goatee and wears glasses. He’s sore from a boxing workout the night before, a reminder that he’s in his late 30s.
Zatko says he can’t talk about what he does at BBN, other than to say it’s security-related and for some unmentionable three-lettered government agencies. He also says he returned to BBN, which employed him in the 1990s, before the L0pht was his job, in part because BBN told him there could be no publicity about the projects he was working on. “That was attractive as hell,” he says.
But Zatko can’t seem to stay out of the spotlight. He is the obvious model for “Soxster,” one of the main characters in former cyberczar Richard A. Clarke’s new novel, Breakpoint (the L0pht itself appears as “the Dugout”). And he acknowledges that he still “wants to make a dent in the universe,” the old motto of the L0pht.
After an hour of talking about the L0pht, Zatko suggests a tour of the older parts of the BBN laboratory in Cambridge, dating from when it was an acoustics consultancy. He shows off the silent room, the amplification room, the sonar tank, the place where it developed Boomerang—a technology being used in Iraq to help find snipers—and he talks about how much he likes the variety of the cool ideas BBN pursues.
“Originally, the L0pht was meant as a microcosm of here,” he says, with a wistful expression.
The spirit of the L0pht lives on most directly at Veracode, the security software company started by Wysopal and Rioux after they left Symantec in 2005. The company launched at the RSA Security Conference in February.
Wysopal post-L0pht helped codify responsible disclosure policies and establish the Organization of Internet Safety, and while starting Veracode he also managed to be lead author of The Art of Software Security Testing, published in December 2006.
Wysopal, at a rangy 6 foot 2 inches, was the tallest member of the L0pht and the oldest (he’s now 41). Rioux (whose handle Dildog was the original name Dilbert creator Scott Adams gave to Dogbert) was the shortest and youngest (now 29).
In early January, sitting in the conference room at Veracode, the two play Click-and-Clack about their time at the L0pht, and the purpose of Veracode, which in a real sense extends the L0pht’s mission: to make software more secure, in this case by offering a Web-based service that automatically checks software for security flaws, via a clever—and patented—technique for data flow modeling and modeling control flow analysis developed by Rioux.
Told of Ranum’s comments, Rioux makes a slight grimace. “The days are over when we should be flinging mud over the Internet about vulnerabilities,” he says.
Veracode has pulled in $19.5 million in capital from Polaris Venture Partners, Atlas Venture and .406 Ventures. While it has competitors, such as Coverity, Fortify and Ounce Labs, Veracode’s approach is “a cool spin” on existing security technology, according to Gartner’s Pescatore.
Both Wysopal and Rioux believe Veracode is ready to sharply reduce the world’s total number of software vulnerabilities.
The L0pht, then, are all now unquestionably legitimate, and their evolution serves as a metaphor for the security business, which is now mainstream. Companies like Microsoft and Oracle have developed methods to take care of vulnerabilities, and the L0pht deserves some credit for that turn of events. While the disclosure wars are again raging, thanks to bug-a-day campaigns and other ploys by the hackers of today, the L0pht’s overall impact on corporate security has been positive, say many, including Howard Schmidt, who knew the L0pht both in his role as a computer forensics investigator at the Air Force and as CSO at Microsoft.
Still, some vendors continue to try to shove security issues under the rug, and there is no question that more of the Internet is under attack today than ever before. So what of that?
Peter Neumann (no relation to the L0pht’s Stefan von Neumann) is 74 and still a principal scientist at SRI, working on security issues. He also testified before the Senate subcommittee on that day in May 1998. He says security vulnerabilities are a part of a much bigger set of problems that have existed for 40 years and probably will exist 40 years from now. But he chuckles when asked about the L0pht, saying, “They were pointing out that the emperor has no clothes on, and nobody wants to hear that, but they did it in a tasteful way that made people listen. They made a difference.”
I’m so very proud of my friends, and feel fortunate today to have had these people in my life as examples. Hell, just today I discovered a hacker friend of mine, Josh Klein (who I met after handles weren’t quite so important to ones safety, so I don’t know his) was not only the speaker in a TED talk, some of the most amazing presentations on the planet, but was in Oprah fucking magazine talking about his passions and experiments. My peeps are DOING something.
I, too, am out there doing my part to make a dent in the universe. I support a company I believe in as I make my base living to earn the stable springboard life situation I’ve built to do my more risky work. I’ve found a way to channel my compulsion to express and tell vivid stories, and the skills I’ve picked up along the way, toward a non-profit that matters. I have done some meaningful things, and I am growing, expanding, discovering new routes and possibilities nearly every day. I’ve come a long way from the girl who was found passed out under a van before defcon 6 had even started.
For a time, I wondered if my life choices, and the people I spent time with, were the reason I seemed so fucked up and constantly struggling. I wonder 15 years later, if they’re a part of the reason that, right now, I’m not.
I remember a specific interaction I had as a very young person, as I began to withdraw in response to the pressures of significant dysfunction and tension in my home life. A no-doubt well-intentioned, somewhat concerned figure of authority and reverence to me, probably my Dad or one of my favorite teachers, took me aside and mentioned missing the bubbly me. 
In my teens, my deep desire for a quiet safety and security was under constant, incessant attack. Though eventually recognizing the wisdom in doing so, I left high school an angry, guarded, self-perceived social failure, even though I passed the equivalency exam with ease at the age of 15, immediately and very successfully joining the work force. 
I have often been assuming that those responses were just me being weak, and seen my anxiety an unnecessary obstacle, or worse, a fundamental psychological flaw. I have scorned myself for wanting to be alone, for wanting to hide, for wanting quiet around me, when I feel scared or threatened or off kilter or tired. 
