Erik Bloodaxe (hacker)

Chris Goggans
Born (1970-01-01) January 1, 1970 (age 54)
New York City, New York, U.S.
Other namesEric Bloodaxe
Occupation(s)Programmer, entrepreneur, editor
Known forFounding member of Legion of Doom (hacking) (LOD), Hacking, infosec, computer security

Chris Goggans (also known as Erik Bloodaxe in honor of the Viking king Eric I of Norway) is an American hacker, a founding member of the Legion of Doom group, and a former editor of Phrack magazine. He is known as an expert in security as well as for his statements on hacker ethics and responsibility.

Career history

Around 1990-1991, Goggans and other Legion members set up a computer security firm, Comsec, which went out of business by 1992.[1][2] He later became a senior network security engineer for WheelGroup, a network security group.[3][4][5]

In his closing remarks at a 1995 conference, Goggans remarked that the global hacker community was disorganized and uncoordinated, suggesting that they should focus an attack on some foreign country, such as France.[6][7]

As of 2005, Goggans is a recognized expert on information security. He has performed network security assessments for some of the world's largest corporations, including all facets of critical infrastructure, with work spanning 22 countries across four continents. Goggans has worked with US Federal law enforcement agencies on notorious computer crime cases. His work has been referenced in publications such as Time, Newsweek, and Computerworld, as well as on networks such as CNN and CNBC.[citation needed]

Goggans has been asked to present at major conferences such as COMDEX, CSI, ISACA, and the Black Hat Briefings[citation needed], as well as having co-authored numerous books, including Implementing Internet Security, Internet Security Professional Reference, Windows NT Security, and The Complete Internet Business Toolkit.

During the summer of 2003, Goggans was invited to become an associate professor at the University of Tokyo's Center for Collaborative Research.[citation needed]. In the winter of 2008, Chris Goggans was in India for the ClubHack hacker convention.[8]

Currently, Goggans is president of SDI, Inc., a Virginia-based corporation providing information security consulting.

Issues with law enforcement

Goggans was raided by the US Secret Service on March 1, 1990, but was not charged.[9]

In a 1994 interview, he claimed he had never engaged in malicious hacking, explaining:

"Malicious hacking pretty much stands against everything that I adhere to. You always hear people talking about this so-called hacker ethic and I really do believe that. I would never wipe anything out. I would never take a system down and delete anything off of a system. Any time I was ever in a system, I'd look around the system, I'd see how the system was architectured, see how the directory structures differed from different types of other operating systems, make notes about this command being similar to that command on a different type of system, so it made it easier for me to learn that operating system" "Sure, I was in The Legion of Doom. I have been in everybody's system. But I have never been arrested. I have never broken anything, I have never done anything really, really, criminally bad.”[10]

However, in a phone call intercepted by the Australian Federal Police as part of an investigation into Australian hacker Phoenix (Nahshon Even-Chaim) Goggans was heard planning a raid in which the pair would steal source code and developmental software from Execucom, a Texas-based software and technology company headquartered in Austin, and sell it to the company's rivals.

In the call, recorded on February 22, 1990, and later presented in the County Court of Victoria[11] as evidence against Even-Chaim, Goggans and Even-Chaim canvassed how much money they could make from such a venture and how they would split fees from Execucom's competitors. During the call, Goggans provided Even-Chaim with a number of dial-up access numbers to Execucom's computers, commenting: "There are serious things I want to do at that place", and "There’s stuff that needs to happen to Execucom".[12] While there is no evidence that Goggans and Even-Chaim acted on this discussion, Goggans' statement of his intentions calls into question the nobility of his hacking ethics.[13]

References

  1. ^ Slatalla, Michelle; Quittner, Josh. "Gang War in Cyberspace". Wired.
  2. ^ New York Times News Service. "Computer Hackers Put New Twist on 'west Side Story'". chicagotribune.com.
  3. ^ Jordan, Tim; Taylor, Paul (1 November 1998). "A Sociology of Hackers". The Sociological Review. 46 (4): 757–780. doi:10.1111/1467-954X.00139. ISSN 0038-0261. S2CID 56336311.
  4. ^ Godwin, Grover Maurice (2000). Criminal Psychology and Forensic Technology: A Collaborative Approach to Effective Profiling. CRC Press (Taylor & Francis). p. 224. ISBN 978-1-4200-3862-0.
  5. ^ Wall, David S. (2017). Cyberspace Crime. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-351-77661-5.
  6. ^ Reed, Vincent. "SUMMERCON '95 Conference Report". www.ieee-security.org.
  7. ^ Voyager. "Hacker Scene". dl.packetstormsecurity.net.
  8. ^ "clubhack.com". clubhack.com. Retrieved 2014-07-17.
  9. ^ Sterling, Bruce (1994). "Part 2: The Digital Underground". The Hacker Crackdown : Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier. Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 2008-07-30.
  10. ^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2005-08-30. Retrieved 2005-08-12.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  11. ^ "countycourt.vic.gov.au". countycourt.vic.gov.au. Retrieved 2014-07-17.
  12. ^ Bill Apro & Graeme Hammond (2005). Hackers: The Hunt for Australia's Most Infamous Computer Cracker. Five Mile Press. ISBN 1-74124-722-5.
  13. ^ Even-Chaim was arrested on April 2, 1990 and later convicted of 15 computer crime offences; on October 6, 1993 he was given a suspended 12 month jail sentence and ordered to undertake 500 hours community service. An account of his arrest is also contained in Suelette Dreyfus (1997). Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier. Mandarin. ISBN 1-86330-595-5.