Celebrated Hacker Dan Kaminsky Dead at 42
The cybersecurity world woke up Saturday to news of the sudden passing of Dan Kaminsky (@dakami), a celebrated hacker who is widely credited with pioneering research work on DNS security.
Kaminsky was 42.
A regular speaker at Black Hat and DEFCON conferences over the years, Kaminsky was most recently co-founder and chief scientist at Human Security (formerly known as White Ops), an anti-fraud startup.
He is best known for his groundbreaking DNS cache-poisoning research that prompted an industry-wide scramble to address a major weakness in the way the web worked.
Kaminsky is also credited with amplifying the severity of the SONY rootkit infections back in 2005.
In June 2010, Kaminsky was named by ICANN as one of the Trusted Community Representatives for the DNSSEC root.
He was a graduate of Santa Clara University with a Bachelor’s degree in Operations and Management of Information Services.
Related: Barnaby Jack (1977-2013): Farewell to a Daring Wunderkind