Dan Farmer
More info
- Affiliation
- Purdue, SGI, Sun
- Known for
- COPS, SATAN, The Coroner's Toolkit
The security researcher behind SATAN, the vulnerability scanner that in 1995 convinced half the internet that hackers had just been handed a weapon of mass destruction.
As a student under Gene Spafford at Purdue, Farmer wrote COPS, one of the first tools to audit a Unix system's configuration for weaknesses automatically. In 1993 he and Wietse Venema wrote the paper Improving the Security of Your Site by Breaking Into It, and in 1995 they released SATAN, which did the same thing across the network, against other people's machines.
The name, and the fact that anyone could download it for free, set off a media frenzy; Farmer left SGI around the time of the release. In hindsight SATAN looks mostly like an ancestor of Nmap and modern penetration testing. With Venema he later built The Coroner's Toolkit for digital forensics.