Harlan A. Carvey

Harlan Carvey's interest in computer and information security began while he was an officer in the U.S. military, and a student at the Naval Postgraduate School, earning his MSEE. After leaving military service, he began working in the field of commercial and government information security consulting, performing vulnerability assessments and penetration tests. While employed at one company, he was the sole developer of a program for collecting security-specific information (i.e., Registry entries, file information, configuration settings, etc.) from Windows NT systems during vulnerability assessments. The purpose of the product was to overcome shortfalls in commercial scanning products and provide more valuable information to the customer. Harlan has also done considerable work in the area of incident response and forensics, performing internal and external investigations. He has also written a number of proof-of-concept tools for educating users in such topics as Windows null sessions, file signature analysis, and the retrieval of metadata from a variety of file formats. Harlan's experience with computers began in the early '80s, with a Timex-Sinclair 1000. Around that time, he was learning to program BASIC on an Apple IIe. From there, he moved on to computers such as the Epson QX-10 and the TRS-80, on which he programmed BASIC and learned some rudimentary PASCAL, using the TurboPASCAL compiler. Since then, he's worked with SunOS and Solaris systems, as well as various versions of DOS and Windows, OS/2, and Linux. Harlan has presented at a variety of computer security conferences, including Usenix, DefCon9, Black Hat, GMU2003/HTCIA/RCFG, WACCI, and PFIC2010. He has discussed various topics specific to issues on Windows platforms, such as data hiding, incident response, and forensic analysis. He has had articles published in the Information Security Bulletin, on the SecurityFocus web site, and in the Hakin9 magazine. Finally, Harlan has written a number of open source programs (including RegRipper), which have been made available online and via CDs/DVDs in his books.