Greg Hoglund
American cyber security author
Michael Gregory Hoglund is an American author, researcher, and serial entrepreneur in the cyber security industry. He is the founder of several companies, including Cenzic, HBGary and Outlier Security.2
From Wikipedia’s article on Greg Hoglund (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.
Born 1953.1
About
Hoglund contributed early research to the field of rootkits, software exploitation, buffer overflows, and online game hacking. His later work focused on computer forensics, physical memory forensics, malware detection, and attribution of hackers. He holds a patent on fault injection methods for software testing, and fuzzy hashing for computer forensics. Due to an email leak in 2011, Hoglund is well known to have worked for the U.S. Government and Intelligence Community in the development of rootkits and exploit material. It was also shown that he and his team at HBGary had performed a great deal of research on Chinese Government hackers commonly known as APT (Advanced persistent threat). For a time, his company HBGary was the target of a great deal of media coverage and controversy following the 2011 email leak (see below, Controversy and email leak). HBGary was later acquired by a large defense contractor.
From Wikipedia’s article on Greg Hoglund, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2
Companies
Career
Occupation: computer scientist.4
Hoglund has founded several security startup companies which were still in operation today:
Cenzic, Inc. (formerly known as ClickToSecure, Inc.) Focused on web application security for the Fortune-500.
Bugscan, Inc. Developed an appliance that would scan software for security vulnerabilities without sourcecode. Acquired in 2004 by LogicLibrary, Inc.
HBGary, Inc. Provides a comprehensive suite of software products to detect, analyze, and diagnose Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) and targeted malware. Acquired in 2012 by Mantech International (MANT). HBGary had no outside investors and was owned by the founders and early employees.
Outlier Security, Inc. Provides cloud-based, agentless endpoint detection and response (EDR) systems for enterprises. Acquired in 2017 by Symantec (SYMC).
From Wikipedia’s article on Greg Hoglund (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.
Legal issues and controversies
Controversy and email leak
HBGary found controversy in 2011 after corporate emails were leaked from the now defunct sister company HBGary Federal. Of particular note, the founder of HBGary Federal, Aaron Barr, had authored a draft Powerpoint presentation on information warfare (IW) that was the subject of much interpretation by online reporters and bloggers. It outlined controversial information warfare strategies and techniques, including background checks to discredit online reporters/bloggers, OSINT monitoring of detractors, and disinformation to discredit Wikileaks. This presentation was never shown to be used, and the supposed customers of this work were never actually customers of HBGary Federal, and further stated they were not aware of the presentation.
After the incident in 2011, several hackers branded the attack on HBGary as the work of Anonymous. Later, this branding was abandoned and replaced with the hacking group LulzSec. At this time, the identities of the hackers behind LulzSec were not known. In an interview after the attack, Hoglund characterized the group as criminal hackers and revealed that he had recently refocused HBGary's attribution team, previously used to hunt down Chinese APT (Advanced persistent threat), to instead discover the identities of the Lulzsec hackers. Less than six months later, the leader of LulzSec, Hector Xavier Monsegur (aka Sabu), had been secretly arrested by the FBI and turned into an informant against the rest of Anonymous. HBGary admitted to working closely with law enforcement, and was later given credit for their assistance to the FBI in the investigation that lead to the arrest of the LulzSec leader Hector Xavier Monsegur (aka Sabu).
From Wikipedia’s article on Greg Hoglund (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.
Links
Sources
The numbers on this page point here. Each one links to the record it came from.
- 1WikidataGreg Hoglund on Wikidata
- 2WikipediaGreg Hoglund on Wikipedia
- 3
- 4
- 5WikidataHBGary, Founder