Thread by @AlecMuffett

Earlier today I got a shout-out for a presentation that I did at "Access All Areas 2" in 1995 - a UK @defcon-alike organised by @mala and @FakeDaveGreen (IIRC?)

Thing is: I still have the talk online, and it's mildly significant.

https://twitter.com/sunosninja/status/1294230966593097728

The pitch was "INTERNET TOOL OF DOOM!" which was riffing on the "SATAN" hysteria of the year previous, and also my experienced with publishing Crack, prior:

The attached are my speaker's notes, near verbatim, with some crappy 1996-era HTML added to infix the images and source code of the tools.

What's interesting is that the code cited is essentially a cut-down version of AutoHack which I had developed inside SunMicrosystems a year or two, previously, and had presented at USENIX but was not permitted to open-source. It's a lot like AutoHack v0.1
usenix.org/conference/5th…

In the design you can see a lot of what came subsequently in Nessus and other tools; although much of the functionality which NMap later came to dominate was forged by @cklaus1's original "iss" tool, and of course SATAN and others.

Infosec tooling is a cycle of reinvention.

If you would like to read it for yourself, and scroll back 25+ years of both web design and infosec:
dropsafe.crypticide.com/alecm/presenta…

Also, I'm pretty sure it was the first time I met @thedarktangent, @marcwrogers, @JackGavigan and several other then (and now?) reprobates. :-)

I do sometimes wonder, though, what would have happened if I *had* successfully persuaded my recalcitrant and somewhat conservative management, that there was a net good in releasing AutoHack.

For one thing: Sun would perhaps have owned SOC-as-a-Service offerings...