Dave Kennedy
More info
- Known for
- Social-Engineer Toolkit (SET), DerbyCon
- Affiliation
- TrustedSec, Binary Defense
American penetration tester who wrote the Social-Engineer Toolkit and turned phishing into something you launch from a menu.
Kennedy came out of signals intelligence in the US Marine Corps and was chief security officer at ATM maker Diebold before striking out on his own. His most widely used tool is SET, the Social-Engineer Toolkit, which wraps cloned login pages, malicious attachments and USB attacks behind a text menu. It ships with Kali Linux and has probably done more to demonstrate social engineering to boards than any number of conference talks.
He founded the consultancy TrustedSec in 2012 and later Binary Defense, co-wrote Metasploit: The Penetration Tester's Guide (2011), and started DerbyCon in Louisville. It ran from 2011 to 2019 and was known for being cheap, rowdy and full of people who couldn't have afforded Black Hat.