In-depth interview: Angelo Dell'Aera

Angelo Dell’Aera (@angelodellaera) is currently Chief Executive Officer of the Honeynet Project. His interests are botnet tracking, honeyclient technologies and malware analysis. His previous research on TCP congestion control algorithms led to the design of the TCP Westwood+ algorithm and the implementation in the official Linux kernel. He’s the lead developer of the low-interaction honeyclient Thug. He will be giving a presentation and a live demo on Thug at the upcoming The Honeynet Project workshop in Warsaw, on May 12th and 13th. Here are his answers to our questions: keep reading to get to know a bit more about him.

Tell us, how did you get involved in the security community?
I got involved in information security about 15 years ago for fun. Together with some friends of mine we used to spend a lot of time understanding how things were done and built in the real world. After a few years spent understanding the inner details of operating systems and computer architectures I realized that understanding the security threats and issues turned to be simple and funny at the same time. And this hobby turned to be my daily job.

And what will you talk about?
I will give a presentation and a demo session about Thug, a low-interaction honeyclient I am currently working on. I hope to inspire people to use this tool and (why not?) to consider spending some time in contributing it.

What do you love the most being a security expert?
Understanding what is really going on out there. Understanding the threats and being able to create tools to analyze, solve or mitigate them is what I love most of all.

So, what do you think the future security threats will be like?
There will always be new threats and we should be aware of it. I don’t know what the next threats will be. I can just imagine but no absolute certainty. What I know is that the only way for facing and solving them is through knowledge. And sharing knowledge is the most important reason why The Honeynet Project exists in the first place.

And what is your best tip for (upcoming) security professionals today?
Just be curious, read what others did before you and dive deep into details. Sometimes you will find asking yourself why you are studying such stuff but one day or another you will realize that understanding the details means understanding everything.

Last question, maybe a little subjective, why should people come to or sponsor the upcoming (and awesome) HP workshop in Warshaw?
As Lukas already said, The Honeynet Project Workshop has always been an unique opportunity to meet a large group of security experts which all have the goal to share, help and discuss. And, believe me, it is a nice opportunity to have good time too.