Christopher Abad is an American hacker , museum curator, artist, network engineer and programmer . He is best known for his qualitative analysis of specialization stratification in the underground economies related to computer crime .

Academic publication and mainstream news coverage [ edit ]

While at UCLA , Abad discovered a method by which collisions in the hash function used in Internet Protocol datagrams may be leveraged to enable covert channel communications. ^[1] His discovery was a centerpiece of covert communications methodology and was the primary citation for an Association for Computing Machinery paper on covert channel detection ^[2] and another on a similar technique using TCP timestamps , ^[3] the two most well-cited and widely republished papers on the subject.

In 2005 while working at Cloudmark, Abad spent six months examining the phishing underworld from the inside. ^[4] Abad discovered that phishers were using IRC channels in order to trade personal information. ^[5] He stalked and collected messages from thirteen chat rooms phishers use. ^[5] Whereas past phishing researchers believed that phishing was coordinated by highly organized criminals, Abad discovered that phishing rings were decentralized. ^[5] Abad published his findings in First Monday . ^[6] This paper was the first examination of how the economy of phishing agents functioned, and highlighted the high degree of specialization within the economy.

20 GOTO 10 [ edit ]

Abad was the founder and owner ^[7] of 20 GOTO 10 (2008?2012), a former gallery which caters not only to fine art, but to " hacker " art, with an emphasis on technology as art, or exhibits which make the potentially criminal or unethical aspects of computer security accessible to the public. ^[8] The gallery received many favorable reviews coverage for its airing of art related to the computer underground, including ANSI ^[9] and 3D ^[10] art.

References [ edit ]