HD Moore Unplugged

HD Moore got his first real job in security research eight years ago, at the tender age of 17. He worked for the U.S. Department of Defense.

Moore, who today is one of the best known names in security research, had just returned to high school after dropping out for two years. He was getting some hands-on experience in security by auditing, consulting, and setting up collocation servers. Moore didn't have the proper classified security clearance at DOD, but his job description was written so that his then-rare skills could still be applied to some classified DOD work. He developed some exploits and wrote "something that captures traffic based on a set of rules" (essentially a sniffer) for DOD.

Figure 1: Security researcher HD Moore.

"An example of how my development role worked -- really vague requirements that allowed me to provide useful code for projects that were classified," says Moore, director of security research with BreakingPoint Systems and developer of the wildly popular open source Metasploit tool. (See Metasploit Issues New Beta and Free Fuzzing Tool Launched.)

Today, most everything Moore, 25, does is watched closely by the commercial world, especially by software companies like Microsoft. His Metasploit penetration testing software has been hailed as a crucial tool for security white hats (the black hats love it, too), and his memorable Month of Browser Bugs (MOBB) project and other vulnerability discoveries and disclosures at times have put him at odds with Microsoft. (See Getting Buggy with the MOBB.) All of this activity has made him one of the most respected -- and sometimes criticized -- security researchers.

Moore's awkward relationship with Microsoft hasn't really changed much, he says, despite having several friends working there and his close ties with the Microsoft Security Response Team. Microsoft has at times credited him with finding bugs, and he gets invited to its Blue Hat summits. But his knack for finding and disclosing bugs in Microsoft's products hasn't always ingratiated him with the software giant. "There are definitely people there who see anyone who doesn't play by their rules as detrimental," he says. "And there are really sharp people at Microsoft who really care about the code and what they are working on."

But the relationship has definitely improved from when one former Microsoftie resorted to publicly calling Moore "spawn of the devil" and a few other choice things, he says.

Moore's philosophy on sharing and disclosing research information is "share early, share often." He admits, though, that his vulnerability data and tools can be abused by bad guys, too. When he gets complaints of the Metasploit tool being used to break into an organization, he says he doesn't feel guilty. "Yes, we provide the tools you can use for bad things, but we are not responsible for people misusing them," he says. "Nor are we saying you had it coming to you because you weren't patching."

Moore says what scares him most about security today is how careless people are about it. Once while driving around San Antonio with some friends and "watching" network traffic, he saw someone uploading "warez" files onto an FTP server housing medical transcription logs. It was some kids storing their pirated software on the outpatient services organization's server, he says. "The fact is, they were totally exposed," he says of the outpatient organization. And many people are afraid to blow the whistle when their organizations aren't properly handling sensitive data. "They’re scared to talk or don’t want to be involved in criminal charges," he says. "What scares me is this gross negligence [out there], and [there's] no way to report it responsibly."

Of course, being the industry's most famous white hat hacker also makes you a popular target. Moore says he's regularly "hammered" by attempted hacks, but he was only really hit once, when he worked for Digital Defense. While vacationing in Tokyo, he found a previously unknown vulnerability being exploited on the latest version of software on one of the servers he was maintaining. "I had to reverse-engineer it, bring the server down, and patch it."

That apparently provoked the hackers further. "They got pissed off and DDOSed us for two weeks," he says.

Lately, Moore has been busy with his day job, putting the final touches on exploits he's writing for a new product rollout for BreakingPoint. He spends his evenings working on Metasploit 3.0 and mapping out another pet project of his, building a more user-friendly Metasploit that any admin can use.

"If you don't know what an exploit is, it's difficult to use the current version," he says. "Our goal is to make exploit and vulnerability information more accessible" so admins wouldn’t need to be exploit experts to determine whether they should patch for a particular vulnerability.

Meanwhile, Moore's rock star status is about to go Hollywood (yes, really). The upcoming Die Hard sequel with Bruce Willis will feature an evil hacker named "evil hax0r" who takes down the U.S. infrastructure using the Metasploit tool. Moore can't help rooting for the bad guy: "Who needs marketing with movies like this?"

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