Michael Graham still recalls the side project that launched his career in security. An analyst at a major transportation company, he installed a series of open source network intrusion detection devices — a brand new technology set at the time — and started to rebuild the underlying OS to get them functional. His goal was to capture enough traffic to more clearly diagnose recent network issues. Two weeks later, the infamous computer worm Code Red struck. While the technology that tracked packages and planes was intact, almost the entire corporate network went down. While the company began working on isolating and containing the problem, he started digging into his project’s nascent early logging system. He found the contractor laptop — sitting two floors beneath him — from which the initial infection originated.
