RSnake, Unmasked

10:55 AM -- The snake is coming out of the shadows: Hacker RSnake, who founded ha.ckers.org, sla.ckers.org, and is a blogger for Dark Reading, has started his own boutique security consultancy. RSnake -- a.k.a. Robert Hansen -- is now heading up SecTheory, which will work with mid-sized companies (100-1,000 employees) that are under the same regulatory pressures as the big guys but don't have the staff or funding for the proper security expertise.

"As PCI becomes a bigger deal, strong security people are going to be harder and harder to find," says RSnake, whose day job for the past year was director of product management for a real-estate company, a Website job that had nothing to do with security.

RSnake has consulted on the side for a number of large enterprises in the past, and he plans to continue sharing as much of his experience as he can on his hacker sites. But he warns that he can no longer be considered unbiased now that he's back in the security industry game.

As for the new consulting firm, RSnake says he doesn't plan to invent new tools or treat their clients "like an assembly line." "Every company has unique challenges and needs, and I want our company to get to know them and work with them instead of just giving them a templated report."

He says he'll do whatever they need, whether it's help with their architecture, writing requirements documents, strategic planning, vulnerability assessments, whatever. "I don't want to be a shop that becomes too specialized or too bogged down in what we can and can't do," he says. And if there's something his firm can't do, he says they'll find one who can.

What about ha.ckers and sla.ckers? No worries, RSnake says. He'll continue with his work and posts on ha.ckers and sla.ckers "for the foreseeable future," he says. "It's a great way to stay in touch with the security world."

RSnake in the past has served in advisory roles for security startups and doesn't plan to discontinue his work there, either. (He'll still blog for Dark Reading, too).

"The reason I felt it necessary to come out of the shadows at all is that I felt it was unfair to keep that information from my readership," he says. "My readers had the right to know where their information was coming from. It may shape people's opinions of me or the site, but it would have been unfair to hide the fact that I had moved back into security."

He admits stepping out from behind his RSnake identity and mystique was a little scary, and risky. But he has no regrets: "I was a little worried about coming out of the shadows, as it were, but if you add up the good and the bad, I'm really just happy to be back in the security world -- it's where I belong."

— Kelly Jackson Higgins, Senior Editor, Dark Reading