Adam Laurie

Adam Laurie is Chief Security Officer and a Director of The Bunker Secure Hosting Ltd. He started in the computer industry in the late Seventies, working as a computer programmer on PDP-8 and other mini computers, and then on various Unix, Dos and CP/M based micro computers as they emerged in the Eighties. He quickly became interested in the underlying network and data protocols, and moved his attention to those areas and away from programming, starting a data conversion company which rapidly grew to become Europe's largest specialist in that field (A.L. downloading Services). During this period, he successfully disproved the industry lie that music CDs could not be read by computers, and, with help from his brother Ben, wrote the world's first CD ripper, 'CDGRAB'. At this point, he and Ben became interested in the newly emerging concept of 'The Internet', and were involved in various early open source projects, the most well known of which is probably their own—'Apache-SSL'—which went on to become the de-facto standard secure web server. Since the late Nineties they have focused their attention on security, and have been the authors of various papers exposing flaws in Internet services and/or software, as well as pioneering the concept of re-using military data centres (housed in underground nuclear bunkers - http://www.thebunker.net) as secure hosting facilities. Adam has been a senior member of staff at DEFCON since 1997, and also acted as a member of staff during the early years of the Black Hat Briefings.