"You have this enormous network and no one knows what's out there." -- Dan Farmer
Dan Farmer (born April 5, 1962) is an American computer security researcher. In a summer course in 1989, in order to graduate from Purdue University he started the development of the COPS program for identifying security issues on Unix systems under Gene Spafford, first releasing it after leaving Purdue in late 1989. In 1995, he and Wietse Venema created Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks (SATAN), one of the earliest network based vulnerability scanners.
SATAN was a controversial program when it was released, because some security administrators and law enforcement personnel believed that hackers would use it to identify and break into private networks. The release of SATAN led SGI to fire Dan Farmer.
With Venema, Farmer authored Forensic Discovery, a book about forensic techniques for gathering digital evidence.
Dan Farmer was the CTO of Elemental Security, a company he co-founded with Dayne Myers.
"I was interested in implements of mass destruction - from an academic point of view.""If you don't want to deal with them, fine. But don't hamper other people from dealing with them.""People don't want to talk about death, just like they don't want to talk about computer security. Maybe I should have named my workstation Fear. People are so motivated by fear.""The whole idea that what is not normal should be kept secret - that's really distasteful to me."