26 Facts About Dan Kaminsky

Daniel Kaminsky was an American computer security researcher.

Dan Kaminsky was a co-founder and chief scientist of Human Security, a computer security company.

Dan Kaminsky previously worked for Cisco, Avaya, and IOActive, where he was the director of penetration testing.

Dan Kaminsky was known among computer security experts for his work on DNS cache poisoning, for showing that the Sony rootkit had infected at least 568,000 computers, and for his talks at the Black Hat Briefings.

Daniel Kaminsky was born in San Francisco on February 7,1979, to Marshall Kaminsky and Trudy Maurer.

Dan Kaminsky's mother told The New York Times that after his father bought him a RadioShack computer at age four, Kaminsky had taught himself to code by age five.

At 11, his mother received a call from a government security administrator who told her that Dan Kaminsky had used penetration testing to intrude into military computers, and that the family's Internet would be cut off.

Dan Kaminsky's mother responded by saying if their access was cut, she would take out an advertisement in the San Francisco Chronicle to publicize the fact that an 11-year-old could break military computer security.

In 2008, after Dan Kaminsky found and coordinated a fix for a fundamental DNS flaw, he was approached by the administrator, who thanked him and asked to be introduced to his mother.

Dan Kaminsky attended St Ignatius College Preparatory and Santa Clara University.

Dan Kaminsky used this technique to estimate that there were at least 568,000 networks that had computers with the rootkit.

Dan Kaminsky then used his research to bring more awareness to the issue while Sony executives were trying to play it down.

Dan Kaminsky demonstrated this process by setting up Rickrolls on Facebook and PayPal.

Dan Kaminsky went public after working with the ad networks in question to eliminate the immediate cross-site scripting vulnerability.

In 2008, Dan Kaminsky discovered a fundamental flaw in the Domain Name System protocol that could allow attackers to easily perform cache poisoning attacks on most nameservers.

Dan Kaminsky worked with DNS vendors in secret to develop a patch to make exploiting the vulnerability more difficult, releasing it on July 8,2008.

Dan Kaminsky had intended not to publicize details of the attack until 30 days after the release of the patch, but details were leaked on July 21,2008.

Dan Kaminsky later presented his findings at the Black Hat Briefings, at which he wore both a suit and rollerskates.

Dan Kaminsky received a substantial amount of mainstream press after disclosing this vulnerability, but experienced some backlash from the computer security community for not immediately disclosing his attack.

DNSSEC, which Dan Kaminsky spoke in favor of, has since been widely deployed, bringing cryptographic assurance to results provided by DNS.

On March 27,2009, Dan Kaminsky discovered that Conficker-infected hosts have a detectable signature when scanned remotely.

In 2009, in cooperation with Meredith L Patterson and Len Sassaman, Kaminsky discovered numerous flaws in the SSL protocol.

In June 2010, Dan Kaminsky released Interpolique, a beta framework for addressing injection attacks such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting in a manner comfortable to developers.

At various points in his career, Dan Kaminsky shifted his focus to work on projects related to his friends' and family's health, developing an app that helps colorblind people, working on hearing aid technology, and developing telemedicine tools related to AIDS among refugees for Academic Model Providing Access to Healthcare.

Dan Kaminsky died on April 23,2021, of diabetic ketoacidosis at his home in San Francisco.

Dan Kaminsky had been frequently hospitalized for the disease in prior years.