About Me

From The Math Club

Well I am Christopher Abad and I'm from San Francisco and both of my parents are from San Francisco. The Math Club is my site and I like math (art). I don't have a high school diploma. I went to high school and I took two extra science classes as my elective courses, got some pretty sweet grades and then got kicked out of school two years later. From there I went to community college for two years, and at first I lied about my age to other students because I was embarassed to admit I was 16, plus sexy college girls wouldn't be into a kid.

After that I transfered to UCLA to study mathematics (which apparently I'm terrible at) and thats when I moved to Santa Monica. I had no job and no real savings since I spent most of it on a trip to europe earlier in the year. I got a call from Foundstone for a reference regarding my friend Marshall Beddoe. Literally, the second I got off the phone, I called them back via *69 and asked for a job. It turns out they were interviewing for more Research positions so then I got my first real job in network security.

I switched jobs a few times since then, working for Qualys, nCircle, and Foundstone again until their final acquisition by McAfee and now to Cloudmark.

I've done many conference presentations over the years at Defcon, ToorCon, Blackhat, RECon and CanSecWest. The first talks were with our pioneering work in Passive Network Mapping and The Siphon Project. Neither the conference presentations nor the siphon tool were quality work and we were really young, and I didn't take them seriously, but I probably should have. The idea behind siphon was reimplimented into a very successful tool called p0f. I've also presented at CanSecWest with another mediocre talk on Format String Vulnerabilities. After that I stepped my game up all my prensentations have been a hit ever since.

I owned an art gallery, 20 GOTO 10, in the Tenderloin in San Francisco, which was great, we made it on the cover the SF Chronicle's business section.

Tech things I like to do include writing demos, device drivers, compression, translation and classification tools, designing unique audio amplifiers, building software and hardware synthesizers.

I like to eat a lot of food, and I think this is why I'm getting high blood pressure.