Episode 2: sangfroid aka Ralph Logan

Nathan Sportsman:
Ralph Logan, thanks for doing this, man. Thanks. I really appreciate you coming. I’ve known you for 10, 15 years, maybe longer. Let’s start from the very beginning. Where are you from?

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
I was born in Houston, Texas, and shortly after we moved out to the Texas Hill country, Kerrville specifically, and then various places of the Hill Country, new Braunfels, but eventually settling back in the Houston area, Northwest Houston area, Magnolia, Texas, where I finished out my schooling up there.

Nathan Sportsman:
What did you get into as a kid? Was it mostly focusing on computers or?

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Yes. Yeah, it really was. I mean, I was the one in the house that took appliances apart and or clock radios or fixed the in television controller when it wore out. But more than just taking it apart, I was the one that could also put it back together, make sure it worked. It may have a part missing from it, but it still worked. It still worked. So my dad’s father specifically is where he learned to do all these things, and in fact, from the time my dad and his brother moved into their design firm that they had for many years, they gave their fabrication business, the bell mouth business, all that to my grandfather on my paternal side, and he worked and ran that up until his death. And then my maternal side, grand father was also an engineer, and he spent his career doing facility design and facility operations for major universities. I think he was one in Tennessee where he is from, but then he came down, he was at University of Houston and then ended his career at Texas a and m doing all that, and he’s the one that actually got me interested in electronics

Nathan Sportsman:
Originally.

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
He and I built my first computer in quotes. It was almost an analog computer, breadboard and switches and LEDs to do basic calculation type things.

Nathan Sportsman:
When you say built it, you guys literally built it up physically

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
From breadboard? Yeah, wire solder lights and toggle switches. My maternal grandfather was the one that gave me my first computer.

Nathan Sportsman:
64 or even?

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
No, no, no, no, no. Gosh, it was the one with the big 16 K module. It was black is about this.

Nathan Sportsman:
This even predates the Apple Sinclair. Okay.

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
It was the Sinclair.

Nathan Sportsman:
Okay.

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Sorry. Yeah, yeah. No, even the keyboard was just like those bubble buttons. It wasn’t even a proper keyboard and a cassette player where you would connect the audio port to audio port and hit record and save your data onto it. And that’s when I really started getting fascinated with it was how that storage worked on magnetic tape. It was puzzling. And back then he also got me a subscription to Bite Magazine. Then the concept I read in the magazine one time, these people were using modems. That’s what got me interested in the telephone system and how it actually worked, switches, all that kind of thing. And there was nothing that we had for reference materials back then, especially out in the country. But I did discover that the local control office for Southwestern Bell back then was only a good six or seven miles from my house, and so when I started driving at 16, I was able to go over there and take a look in their dumpster and see if there were manuals and those kinds of things. So I started making a routine of going and picking through their trash at night because just a dumpster beside the big building, knowing cared, it was 82, 83, but that’s where I started becoming interested in the power of computing more so than just this apple computer. I didn’t have any exposure to it after graduation, bummed around a bit and had various menial jobs, but then I got interested in pursuing EMS as a career I and became an EMT paramedic. Eventually went on to work at Methodist Flight Services there in Houston.

Nathan Sportsman:
So you’re talking about when there’s something serious and they actually, they can’t even, they need to send a helicopter out

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Critical care. Yeah.

Nathan Sportsman:
Okay. Wow.

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Sorry. Flight services helicopter. Working in the flight department there is where I got my real exposure to computing systems. We were working on a Windows three. One computer that was networked with was it OS two? OS two, which is a lot of hospitals used back then, and that’s where I worked with this other guy in the office there that I really got exposed to databases how the larger scale computings work. And I spent many a long night. We worked 13 hour shifts and many long spent many a long night doing data input, but half of that I’d be exploring the networking portion of

Nathan Sportsman:
It. When you say 13 hour shifts, so I would assume you would have a flight plan, you’d go pick someone up, but 13 hour shift in your downtime, you were also, I guess, in the er. Yep.

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Working in the ER also depended on what the demand was, basically.

Nathan Sportsman:
What is that? I’ve never experienced anything like that. Does that just take a toll on you after a while and then you need to?

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
It does. And I was 24 or five years old, married new baby, and it gets to be, it is different. It was for me working in that setting as the hospital emergency than it was for me being a young man, working out on the streets, carrying, packaging, delivering. So it was hard for me to become, it was hard for me to normalize internally the amount of things I was working with and seeing. And so due to that, and I discovered that on the career path, I was on the paramedic track that I wasn’t going to be making that much money. I was working with nurses and doctors and all this, and I started thinking, well, I don’t know how this is going to work for me.

Nathan Sportsman:
I mean, you’re on the front lines. It’s still a huge experience that most people don’t get to have. What was your biggest takeaway from that experience? What was the biggest lessons that you learned or things that you took with you as you moved on into computers later?

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
If you’re working in the emergency room, you’re in bay six at 8:00 PM and you’ve got a patient with a high fever or a medical incident or whatever, two hours later, that same basic is holding a gunshot wound, right? So it’s the experiential, I guess, the place where you experience it. That was more difficult for me and seeing those things happen in the same place, you can’t leave that place. Sure, you can go take a break, but you’re working 13 hours or whatever. And I just have utmost respect for the people that are able to compartmentalize that and go home afterwards. But eventually for me, it wasn’t the injuries or medical incidents or any of that that got to me working that it was seeing the same five-year-old with a broken right arm this time in basics that was there two months ago with a broken left arm or broken out teeth or traumatic head injury or all these things because my daughter was six months old, I guess at this time when I was working there, she was born while I was working there, and it got to a point to where the eventual tearing down or wearing down of my ability to provide patient care all got to a point where I could no longer emotionally handle doing it to these abused children that came in and they continue to come in.
It is really where I think I started to see how shitty people are, not just to themselves, but to defenseless folks. It goes the same way I guess with the elderly. There’s so many abused elderly people out there and all that kind of thing. I just couldn’t take it, couldn’t do it.

Nathan Sportsman:
And seeing those children and then coming back and seeing your daughter and seeing that that’s someone’s child that’s going through that and the innocence of that, just realizing you didn’t have the tools, I think you had mentioned to be able to cope with that. And so ultimately you knew you needed to leave

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
By then I got back into dialing into BBSs and

Nathan Sportsman:
What is a BBS

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Bulletin board systems that local, of course, cause any toll charges in the Houston area. There were some really good ones. I don’t remember the name of them now, but they were mostly informatic for me to once again learn about what new things in programming there was. I think that’s where I had got a copy of Borland, which is a software development package from way back when.

Nathan Sportsman:
So these BBSs or bulletin boards. So you’d basically call into a computer that was A BBS, and there would just be stuff there for you, whether it’s

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Files

Nathan Sportsman:
Or borland or whatever the case is. And you,

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Right? Yeah. So the BBS would either be a single modem that somebody shared their computer with the BBS software on, or some BSS had a rack of modems that would answer when you call in. So you would also have to, there’s time limits put on it. You had to earn credits in order to be able to stay on certain long. They would disconnect you after certain many minutes. So it was when I first started dialing into them, I realized that there’s got to be some way to get around these limitations. And then I discovered the cult of the dead cow text files, T files.

Nathan Sportsman:
And this was all after on one of ’em, EMT or while you were still there.

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
It was after. So early nineties.

Nathan Sportsman:
Cult of the Dead Cow. So was that BBS? That wasn’t in Houston. That was Lubbock. In Lubbock, okay.

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
I discovered them on one of the Houston local, and that’s what got me interested in Hacking. Hacking.

Nathan Sportsman:
And for those that don’t know, can you just talk a little bit about Cult of the Dead Cow and the history of that? What is,

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Sure, I’m an outsider, but it was founded as, I think you said in Lubbock, Texas Grand Rat and some friends, I think they were a subversive anarchic, not even hacking type group that wrote these text files, which they called T files. And it was everything from fictional stories to technical to down with the man fiction, nonfiction, just interesting kind of underground magazine type text files of which notable presidential candidate from, I think two cycles ago, Beto O’Rourke was a member, psychedelic warlord was his handle. There were all kinds of crazy people and I enjoyed the Underground Slant to it all. I’ve since become friends with a lot of those folks.

Nathan Sportsman:
So Beto O’Rourke, that’s a name US congressman, US Senate candidate for Texas, and then ultimately presidential candidate. And so the CDC, obviously I wasn’t there, but just when I read, it’s sort of a collection of people that are coming together until you’re starting to get exposed. But from EMT, if I remember from the notes, you actually went to oil and gas next. Is that right?

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
No, I went to work for a PC company in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Nathan Sportsman:
Okay.

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
It was on these BBSs, sorry. I graduated from the BBSs to logging on to this internet relay chat network called F Net where I found the C of the Dead Cow channel, the CDC channel and various other things like software cracking channels and back. It was the Wild West back then. You could get serial numbers and crack codes for all the software that you needed. I didn’t have any money, so that’s the direction I went to get my PC software. So there was a software cracking cheat code, whatever you want to call it, serial number channel called Wears 95. And I became a member of this channel. And at one point a person on there said that they would give someone a job in New Orleans, Louisiana if whomever, whomever found an advanced copy of Command and Conquer two, I believe Red, red Dawn Red, something I didn’t game, never have, never did. But I thought, yeah, I could use a job. And so I did. I got it and put it on an FTP site for him, and he downloaded it and installed it. It worked. And he sent me an invite to come work at his PC assembly company. They were pretty big. They had a big glossy magazine and a website. And so I borrowed money from my maternal grandfather for a plane ticket and packed a couple of suitcases and just like that off the New Orleans I went. Yeah.

Nathan Sportsman:
And so he was building back then, it wasn’t just Dell computers and that sort of stuff. There’s a lot of smaller companies,

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
The base boxes, I think we call ’em now, right? They were just custom, they sold the high-end stuff. It was like, Hey, they got Soundblaster two audio cards. And so I really learned the most about computers working there because the operating systems, well, I mean if you think back, the PC part manufacturers didn’t work well together. Everything from the motherboard to memory to CPU to everything, and these PC enthusiasts would build their dream computer back there and it was our job to make it work. I also worked on the tech support desk desks. There was basically a call center about eight of us, and it was working on that desk that I learned. I got to work with my first mainframe, so our PCs on our desk were networked over, I think Twisted Copper. It was just cereal to the mainframe. And the boss there, a guy named Brisky, Ugg be Bore, who was a Nigerian immigrant, crazy smart guy. And

Nathan Sportsman:
Is this the same guy that said, if you give me an early version of this game?

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
No, the owner of the company

Nathan Sportsman:
Was the one,

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
It was small company. I think there were maybe 40, 50 people total from Warehouse to the office part. But Brisky was in charge of all operations, but highly educated, smart guy. But he was a bit of a fascist overlord management style guy. He used to walk around with a cricket bat and make us ask permission to go to the bathroom or threaten to beat our heads in with the cricket bat if we didn’t close calls la it was your high pressure, solve these people’s problems, get ’em off the phone so we can get more sold and done and make sure everybody’s happy on the way out. It was particularly difficult to work tech support, phone only troubleshooting someone’s motherboard problem that was calling from California, that got their computer a month ago and have done who knows what to it since then. I mean, we had all your typical problems from how do you figure out that somebody didn’t even plug the power cable into it?
That kind of thing where I really learned to work with people and listen and use what I learned in the back, assembling these things to help them find out what their problem was. It wasn’t necessarily that the sound blaster driver wasn’t working in Windows. It was they plugged it into the wrong slot. So it was a really retrospectively learning opportunity to use troubleshooting skills that blindly, literally blindly. But I also learned a lot about networking with the serial, and there was this guy that worked there, Justin, who ran all of our networking, and that’s when I really got into, when I moved to New Orleans, I also started going to 2,600 meetings. One of my very good friends to this day I worked with at this computer place. I went to a bar one night and was chatting with the bartend tender there, and she asked me what I was doing in town.
I told her where I work. She said, oh, my boyfriend’s coming in later. I’ll introduce you. He’s into all that stuff too. And this tall gothy kid, skinny gothy kid comes in a little bit later, introduced himself. He tells me his online name handle, and I told him mine, we’ve been talking for years, each other thing, this random New Orleans bar, and we’ve been best friends since. And he’s the one that was actually more involved in the cults of the Dead Cow and all that whole scene, the whole scene thing, which he had been doing for years, and which started hanging out and went to Defcon and did all those kind of things.

Nathan Sportsman:
And similar to those bulletin boards and those text files from Colta Dead Cow, it’s just a smorgasbord of things that they’re talking about, or was it focused on phones or hacking or what was the content of

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
This? I think initially it was mostly telephones. It was freaking, but then by the time I got into it, there was, well, Linux and Unix and all that had become a lot more popular mid nineties, and it was open source and people were running it. And so the idea of running a more powerful operating system wasn’t closed wall, like Windows had become popular, and so people were writing more C code. They would talk about how to subvert systems.

Nathan Sportsman:
So you guys would pick up these articles and then there would be sort of, I guess local meetups of like-minded people that are interested in the same stuff. Y’all would all get together and just sort of talk about things.

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
There was a, I may still go on, I don’t know, but in major metro areas, 2,600 magazine enthusiasts would meet up, I think one Friday night a month and talk about hacking and phone systems and that kind of thing, just a common interest. And then in New Orleans, we had 26 21, which was the older people then would leave the 2,600 meeting and go to bars and

Nathan Sportsman:
The ones that could drink,

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Right, 21. And that’s where the real discussions we like to say actually took place. The guy that I met at the bar, his real name’s Ryan, told me about a job that was available to me there in New Orleans at Shell Offshore, and it was a contract job upgrading compact PCs from Windows three one to Windows 95 throughout the building. And it paid probably double what I was earning over at the PC place.

Nathan Sportsman:
Were you at headquarters or were you actually Shell offshore? Were you actually having to fly out to those rigs?

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
I’m sorry. Shell Offshore is a division of Shell. The Shell parent company is actually a Dutch company, right at Shell offshore, specifically the headquarters, the office, yes, is there in the CBD in New Orleans, but they are the organizing body, I guess, or whatever, parent, to all offshore activities. So once we did do all the big upgrades there in the office building, the next stage of the big rollout was doing the computers out on the offshore platforms.

Nathan Sportsman:
So you’re back to the helicopters.

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Yeah, it was great. It was wonderful. We’d be assigned a certain number of platforms to do a week, and we’d get up at three or four in the morning on a Monday drive down to Fon, Louisiana or one of the other places where they have helicopter ports and jump on a helicopter. We’d have, I don’t know, two or three compact PCs, and they would organize all the transport, we’d load ’em on the helicopter, fly off to one platform, do the configuration upgrade, switch over, make sure the microwave transceivers working, et cetera, sleep. Next day we catch a helicopter over to the next platform. So they were rolling it out across all their platforms in the Gulf.

Nathan Sportsman:
Did you guys have a roughneck schedule where it’s like two weeks on, two weeks off, because y’all are flying back?

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
No, we, no, we were very much the office hours type. We would go out on a Monday and work till I think Wednesday, and then come back on Thursday and then have Friday off. We worked four days ago. It was a fantastic schedule because we would go and do that, and then we’d have three days back home in New Orleans and go to our 2,600 meetings and meet with our friends. And that time of my life was, I don’t even, people bring up TV shows and popular culture stuff from let’s say 95 to 99. I have never seen an episode of Seinfeld Friends, whatever those shows were that people talk about, it was just a hundred percent spent on computers and networking, hacking from the time you wake up to the time you fall asleep. It was just all of that. It was just wonderful.
It was like there was nothing else because the fascination and focus was just about learning, taking it all in, making something of it, and this fascinating new change that’s going on that nobody else seemed to see. It was like you’re behind the scenes Oz kind of thing, doing all the things and nobody knows what you’re doing. And it was wonderful. And those people that you did meet and you shared that with became your friends, and it wasn’t a closed or click group, it was just like, how can anyone think to do anything but this? I don’t know. They’re crazy. This is a future. I know it’s a future. We’re living in the future kind of thing. It was wonderful. And

Nathan Sportsman:
Is that where you first really wanted to take what sort of a passion and a hobby and try to start pushing into your career as a career?

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
And believe it or not, back to that F net thing, the CDC ties, I met some of the fellows from Loft. Loft was a hacker collective out of Boston, Massachusetts, where these fellas had started a collective type place and rented a space and brought all their computers in there and did some really great research. And I’m sure everybody that may watch this knows who they are and what their name is, but they became really famous later. And anyway, I got introduced to Chris Oppel Weld Pond from the Loft at DEFCON three, I think whichever one was in 1996 or seven, I went with Ryan, the guy from New Orleans to my first defcon. Anyway, I became friends friendly with those loft guys, and we started talking back and forth, and I was working at the government contractor then

Nathan Sportsman:
And on Loft. And some people, particularly some of the younger folks might not be familiar with them when I was growing up. I knew who they were. I remember all the research that they were doing, but they were sort of always at arms length. I didn’t actually know them. And I’ve only recently come to know them through you

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
And

Nathan Sportsman:
You making those introductions to Chris and to Dil Dog and to everyone else. But Loft. They testified in front of Congress at one point, and they talked about how they could take the internet down in a couple of guys, 30 seconds or 30 minutes,

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
30 minutes. I think there’s the

Nathan Sportsman:
Famous panels,

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
The famous, I call it the last supper of the internet picture of them testifying before Congress with Mudge Jesus in the middle there. But I got to know them, and I think it’s kind of worth mentioning we met in person while a lot of these relationships were online. I think what cemented it was we met in person, and that was thanks to Jeff Moss. Jeff Moss is the founder of the Conference Con, which has been going now for 30 years, maybe something like that.
He provided a space where people that share that common interest could come together and pseudo anonymously meet together and share thoughts and ideas and have a place to form a physical community instead of just an online community. And here we are 30 years later, and most of the people that I think you’re going to have in this series, we’re involved at some level with all those things. We still get together at least once a year at either, well, it’s between the two Black Hat and Defcon now. But it provided a place, I think for veracity purposes, once you meet someone in purpose, you’re like, okay, yeah, you’re not just a name on a screen. But it rooted, I guess, or cemented those relationships. And so shortly after that, DEFCON, Chris Oppel, who was working at Bolt, Barnick, and Newman at the time, BB N, where most of the Loft guys ended up working at the same time, BBN is famous for being the company, the organization that received the grant from the US government in the seventies, I think, and established the DARPA net

Nathan Sportsman:
From.

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
So it was, in my opinion, the origin of the internet in the United States. And so Chris called me and said, Hey, we got this job opening coming up as a security engineer. Why don’t you come up and interview for it? Wow. That was the shit. So flew up there and interviewed, got the job, the job offer. So in a period from building PCs in the back of this warehouse where I think I was making $13 an hour to three years later, making 90 grand and moving up to work at PBN was just like dream, dream. Now I have a career path. So moved up to Boston. That’s where I discovered that I hate cold weather.

Nathan Sportsman:
Yeah, me too.

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
And being a native Texan, I don’t think I have fully evolved to be able to actually exist in temperatures below 30 degrees for more than several days at a time.

Nathan Sportsman:
So did you make it through more than one winner, or was

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
It I made it through one winner. I didn’t have a car, so I was taking the tea everywhere. But it was when I moved up there that I really got introduced in person to some of the, I don’t know, greatest minds in what we now call cybersecurity. And once again, nothing else existed. This was it. I got a roommate, I found a roommate, dil Dog, another member of the Loft. We moved in an apartment together. Everything from waking to sleeping was computer security,

Nathan Sportsman:
Everything. You were roommates with Chris?

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was my roommate actually, when I moved up there. I’m just a small town kid. I found my apartment in New Orleans, in the back of the newspaper. I found my next apartment in New Orleans by rooming with my favorite waiter at the local pizza place and lived with him there. So I really had no concept on how to find housing anywhere other than New Orleans. So I moved up there and thought, well, I’ll just

Nathan Sportsman:
Find a spot,

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Find a spot. And I got up there and they’re like, what do you mean? Just find an apartment? You got to find a realtor. I’m like, I need somewhere to stay. And Chris Dil dog’s girlfriend at the time was Lady Ada. Lamar Freed,

Nathan Sportsman:
Also a very famous engineer, right?

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
She’s smart engineer. She was at MIT at the time, but she said to me, we were just out at dinner or something, she said, oh, well, my parents’ basement’s available. It’s fully built out. You can stay there until you get an apartment. And it was just like this instant community, this acceptance of, well, if you’re working with them and they know you, then yeah, just stay. I had this great apartment. It was only a couple of weeks, three weeks. But yeah, so that was my introduction to Boston. I was able to stay there in Lamar’s parents’ basement. And then Chris and I founded an apartment together in Watertown, and it became basically the HubSpot for people that were in that scene throughout Boston. Gosh, all the people that weren’t involved with the Loft that were still friendly would come there. We would have an annual, they call it Grath on, they still do it to this day. It is a very kind of underground thing for hackers and cyber folks in the Boston area. And we had the big grill out there.
It was a, I dunno if I can talk about, yeah, sure, why not? So there was this tank of nitrous, a five foot tank of nitrous that was passed around between various hacker spots, and it ended up in Dodo in my apartment. So we were completely legal to go fill this thing up. I’m not going to say who did it, but it’s somebody that you might have on here. So always kept the tank filled. Of course, we were hackers, so we figured out how to build a nozzle that you could take your trash bag and hook it up. And so a lot of the parties, I would say were, we didn’t drink or anything, just stand around with a garbage bag. It was like a cyber fish concert or Grateful Dead concert. Everyone’s standing around being silly.

Nathan Sportsman:
So was it just, I mean, this immersion that I keep hearing, so basically BB m, by day you’re working, and then at night you’re just hanging out with the Loft crew, either.

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Yeah, loft New City folks,

Nathan Sportsman:
The various Boston folks

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
This time. Well, and by this time, the great migration to the Bay Area from the Boston cyber folks, it all crashed. I think a lot of that Boston scene had their roots in MIT from the old MIT hackers, sixties, seventies kind of thing. So that kind of culture was regarded as commonplace, the kind of critical thinking and hanging out together just to discuss these ideas in more of an academic environment than anything else. Whereas when I experienced it outside of Boston, it was edgy and cool and underground Boston, it was just like, yeah, we’re going to go hang out in whatever Copley Square and have coffee and talk about these things, or do some war dialing from the telephones or the 2,600 meeting. There was in, gosh, one of the big financial buildings had a food court in the bottom of it downtown. I’ve forgotten what it is, but it was aversive.
When people say, you want to learn a foreign language, go live in the country, that is what you did when you’re working in our industry. I was working as a security engineer. This was what, 98, 99. And that role really wasn’t in many companies, but at BB n it was. And it was a role that was still being established, even the need for it. So we worked for the IT manager who reported to the CIO, John Puckett, John Burke, Allen Sonenberg, in order we worked for these fellows, we were IT security, but Mudge, Chris Weis, SOEL, Brian Oblivion, these guys that worked at BBN really took that role and advanced it to a point where it was considered smart to bring the security people in when you were planning or architecting or doing all these things. Because there at BB N, they understood the need for, let’s just say network security being an important thing in the design process. And so by the time I got in, the seeds were already planted for the culture of the business to promote and or need security awareness, security design, security architecture, all these things. So these guys, these people had already done the things there. And it was under the leadership of John Puckett, who was the CIO, that he grew those roles into something, which now we know as cybersecurity. So worked there for a bit. And then Mr. Puckett, who I admire greatly, you mentioned

Nathan Sportsman:
How good of a leader he was and how good of a manager he was. What was it that made him so great?

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
He took the time to explain to me personally how the next 20 years could go if I wanted to pursue this.

Nathan Sportsman:
Where does Woo start to fit in? Is that at this time? Was that earlier? Was that later?

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Yeah, it’s about that time. It was woo woo was founded by then. A very young man, Matt Conover goes by shock. And he was in the Boston area working, he was working out there with another guy, Jordan Ritter, Blake Watts, and we had this IRC channel. We knew each other from 2,600 meetings, that kind of thing. They were peripheral loft friends, just part of that whole group. Andrew Riders another one. And Matt had formed this loose collective of security, white hat, very specifically security researchers and named an IRC Channel Pound woowoo, and just invited various people that are interested in computer security into it. It was a closed channel.

Nathan Sportsman:
And that name Wwo, was it deliberate? Was that just kind of a tongue in cheek joke or

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
All of those things was kind of, he was 17. I dunno what to say about it. I was 27. Anyway, I got involved because of the super smart people. It was Doug Song, Jan Co, what’s his name? Facebook guy Sean Parker, who was also Napster, Jordan Ritter, Sean Fanning Napster, Matt Conover, Blake Watts, Jamie Reed, Adam O’Donnell, Java Man, CDC. So there’s cross pollination of all these people, but oh, how can I forget? Seth McGahn working on various everything from reverse engineering protocols to software to doing all these things and just having fun with it. There was no other, so we’re going to be a group kind of thing. It wasn’t we’re going to be a hacking group or any of that. It was just people sharing ideas and all that. And so for me, it was good because all their research, they just released open free. We didn’t care. We obviously, everybody followed bug track and did all that kind of thing. There was nothing ever malicious. It was just a group of people that were interested in computer security, software security.

Nathan Sportsman:
And so you guys were writing open source security tools, you were writing exploits, all of the above, and then just

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Vulnerability research more than anything. Yeah. I can’t remember if we ever released Exploit Code, but we did this one year do Woo Giving, which is, we released a vulnerability every day for the Thanksgiving holiday for some weird reason. I thought it was going to be a good idea and be fun. And so we did this whole, it used to still be up on the webpage. I don’t think it’s functioning anymore. But yeah, we did fun things

Nathan Sportsman:
And eventually you guys get picked up. We get some notoriety from that. And you get picked up in TE TechCrunch, and there’s this famous article, the Billion Dollar Packer Club. Oh,

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Right, yeah.

Nathan Sportsman:
Is that just from who was in it, or

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
That was much later. Yeah. So back then, the Billion Dollar Hacker Club is referencing Janku, right?

Nathan Sportsman:
Janku is WhatsApp.

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
He’s the founder of WhatsApp. But

Nathan Sportsman:
Now Signal,

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
I don’t know where he is now. I think he’s living on his super yacht off the island of Myorca

Nathan Sportsman:
As one does, as one does.

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Another. Woowoo member, Simon Rosas Emerling is from Myorca. And he sent me a picture just recently of Jan’s yacht off the coast of Myorca. So he might be there. But what I was going to say is back then, Jan was a network engineer for Yahoo at the time. Woo woo. And I mean it getting old’s funny because you think back of these conversations you’re having on IRC, and it would be, we’re seeing this on our network, what do you guys think? And it would be Jan talking about this problem or whatever. And then Doug Song, founder of Arbor Networks and Duo and Doug Song back there. I think he was working for NFR Network Flight Recorder one? No, no, it was the firewall company. I don’t remember. But Jan, I think he just maybe hadn’t even graduated from Michigan. Anyway, so it was just like, we don’t care where Jan works or where Sean works or I work at BB n. It was this sharing of issues, problems. Oh, I saw this. But that’s bug Tre exploit from our vulnerability. It was, I hate to use the term, a good old boy network, is that right? But it was this sharing and helping and doing all these things back right before Napster started

Nathan Sportsman:
And when it,

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Speaking of sharing

Nathan Sportsman:
And when it first kicked off. But Doug hadn’t founded a company yet. You hadn’t been the CEO of Logan Group or Sean Parker at Facebook. That all came later. That all came in at that time. Y’all were hardcore security engineers, just really focused on security

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Research all pretty much on the same level, I guess.

Nathan Sportsman:
Okay. And so that continues on, you maintain this relationship, but you do leave BB n, you said, and you move on to

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Choice Smart. Okay. Which was a startup funded by Disney for selling smart educational toys. How long did

Nathan Sportsman:
You stay at Toy Smart, you and Mr. Punt?

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
It was only in operation, I’m going to say nine months. I can’t recall. But Disney actually pulled, Disney pulled the funding? Yeah, during the dotcom crash

Nathan Sportsman:
Crash. Did the bubble crash,

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t remember the exact mechanism of it, but which big meeting one day? Hey, everybody, Disney pulled the plug. You get two weeks. Thanks.

Nathan Sportsman:
And so did you follow Mr. Puck to the next gig, or where did you go from there?

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
No. A friend of mine, Michael Bernard check, who was also in the scene, who I knew once again from the pound hack route, all that kind of group contacted me because they were building a cybersecurity consulting company where he was working a company called Guardant. And they were looking, Michael was over in the professional services arm, and they were looking to build out a research and development division. And it was the same time that the Loft guys, right around the same time Loft guys started at Stake. And some fellas that I knew that I met at the original DEFCON that I went to back in 90, whatever, six, seven had started, they were at Ernst and Young, a guy named George Kurtz,
Chris Proce, Wil, Wil Chan, Stuart McClure, those guys started. So it was three major consultancies, Foundstone, Guardant, and at Stake all started about the same time. That’s also where I met Mike Schiffman, who was the director of Research and Development. They hired me on as manager of research and development. And I got busy hiring the WOOWOO guys, some of the woowoo guys to be our research and development team. Mike Schiffman brought over some people that he knew Sean Bracken and some other folks. But I hired Matt Conover, Blake Watts, these little woo woo people, Jamie Fullerton, Adam O’Donnell, and some other computer security people I know. And we built out guards research and development team.

Nathan Sportsman:
And so I had a chance to work at Foundstone. It was post the acquisition, but George Kurtz was still there. Can you just talk a little bit about, for those that aren’t familiar, just how big of a deal Guardant was, foundstone at stake in terms of how they shaped the industry and just where everything came from? And I guess ISS as well, they

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Were more product, right? Yeah. They were thinking ISS was, you could say they were along there, but they were product focused, which now we know is probably where a lot of them should have gone, because now knowing business, we know we speak in multiples of services versus product and all those fancy things that value a company. But yeah, so those three computer security consulting companies really shaped the hacker ethos into computer security consulting companies. You had Ernst and Young, Arthur Anderson, all these that were building their cyber security services capabilities up at the same time, but the Loft guys and then us over at Guardant with Schiffman, and you could call us root or hacker or whatever. It was a mix of folks.
And then the Foundstone guys actually came out of Ernst and Young, but they brought the hacker ethos into Foundstone with them, George and Chris, and I think some of the, Stuart wrote the first hacking exposed book while they were at foundstone, right? So it was a really great, for lack of better terms, branding exercise to create this hacker mindset and use that hacker mindset to help people understand the seriousness of cybersecurity to businesses, foundations, organizations. And a lot of people capitalized on it, or sorry, a lot of companies capitalized on it, but it was also really great for we hackers to learn about business. So we had great leaders at Guardant, we had Maria Serino as our CEO, now she’s gone on to have just this storied career. But she brought in, she came over from Razorfish, which was I think a big marketing branding type organization.
And so if you paid attention, and actually I was a little bit older than most of the folks in the r and d group. So I tried to pay attention and be included in the business meetings that went on beyond client meetings, internal business meetings, see how Garant was venture capital backed. So to see how these things fit together, I didn’t have an MBA or any kind of business background, but it was an opportunity to learn how these things actually work. And Maria Serino, once again, a wonderful leader had the ability to see if you were interested in these things and would take the time to actually teach you these things. And so we got a firm foundation in business, Kurtz, and those folks over there luckily had that business background. I say luckily, maybe it wasn’t, but they had that business background that they brought into foundstone, and they built a company around cybersecurity.
Guardant was kind of different because it was the other way. They built a company and then brought in the cybersecurity and the consulting and at stake brought in, I forget their first CEO, but they brought in the business people like Guardant and brought in the hacking ethos underneath it and sold under that banner. So those three companies really shaped and formed the way corporate America, at a minimum, maybe outside of America, I don’t know, but viewed cybersecurity in their business process. They laid the foundation for people. I think most of our job was education about how important these things were and were going to become in the future to American businesses.

Nathan Sportsman:
And like you said, the Anderson Consulting and ENY, the Big four had their own consulting, but here in these three companies, it was extremely entrepreneurial. Like everything that you just said, I experienced that at foundstone where they would give you access to anything that you were curious about. They would encourage you to learn outside of the job that they had hired you for. And it was just this hotbed of where really the hardcore security researchers, whether it was WOO or these other cases, they tended to run through those and ISS as well versus the bigger ones. And so you guys had a chance, even though it was getting professionalized to work together doing stuff at Garden. Is that fair?

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Yeah, that’s fair. And at Guardant at least, they also brought in project managers and other business level people that were out of the big four or five, whatever it was back then. And we had a very open working relationship with these folks because we had to teach them what we were doing so that they could help better secure and do all those things with the clients. And this was also the same time that the C-I-S-S-P sprung up as a certification. ISC two, IS two C, whatever. We were busy at Guardant, at least teaching these consultants that we had on board that came over from the Big five or wherever they came from, larger companies, how to study for their C-I-S-S-P. So we could at least at Guardant become, we have this many CISSPs kind of marketing thing. So the entire spirit of the company was entrepreneurial, as you said, it was more like a hacker collective than it was like an accounting firm, for instance.
So the free flow of ideas and respect for different people’s positions was, hi, Kathy Ger was one of our consultants. She came over from a business consultant side, and I can remember her and some of the other consultants just dropping into the lab and talking for hours about anything, an architectural diagram or this kind of thing. And there was never any of this we’re too cool for you or vice versa. These sits in the dark lab all day and punches around at the screen, listens to techno music. There was none of that. It was a group effort to build this company into something to better serve the security needs of their clients.

Nathan Sportsman:
What you guys built, I mean, it set an impact on the entire industry, all the companies that birthed after that. But like you said, there was venture involved. And so they need an exit. IBM eventually, excuse me. ISS eventually goes to IBM Foundstone gets acquired by McAfee at stake, Symantec, and then you guys

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Ign,

Nathan Sportsman:
Ign

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Ign. Yeah.

Nathan Sportsman:
How did that entrepreneurial spirit and that culture change as things get professionalized, money is involved, an acquirer comes in? What did that look like?

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
I was gone by the time the acquisition occurred.

Nathan Sportsman:
Okay. Did you start to see some of that?

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, sure it did because you do what we eventually started calling MBA spreadsheet security. Everything became billable hours and piano. That’s where I learned PL and all those things that you learned because you have to have that for a consultancy to survive, to actually make money, actually get value. But I don’t think we ever, Guardant ever lost the security minded mission, even though it did get acquired by Verisign. It stayed an island to itself within Verisign and kept that spirit going before complete transformation occurred where they were integrated and all the services got in. But I will say this, we knew the times were changing when the free food vending machine got removed from the office, that was a, what is that? A mile marker, if you will, on the road at Guardant when the free snack machines left the building, we knew times were changing.

Nathan Sportsman:
And so in the late nineties, early two thousands, it’s sort of this fringe culture. It’s in the spirit of free and unfettered information. It’s in the spirit of you accept me, I accept you. It gets professionalized and people start to turn it into careers. When those first acquisitions happened, and maybe this is the wrong word, but I’m just curious, your thoughts, did the industry or what we were doing to begin to lose some of its innocence at that point as things start to be about the bottom line and stuff like

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
That? It did, and I joke with George Kurtz and Chris Ze about this all the time. I think year two or three of Foundstone, they took a marketing or PR photo, and they all had matching shirts with monogrammed foundstone here, and they were either on a staircase or an escalator or something. And so we cool kids were all like you guys sold out kind of thing. It was just kind of like, Hey, nice matching shirts, meet at the country club later. That kind of thing. But they weren’t out of step with the band. We were right kind of thing. And yeah, the industry was changing. It was, I guess, normalizing towards the accounting firm type structure because in the end, the services business is really, really difficult to maintain. You may know this.
So to maintain the hacker mentality, I mean, you can create that pod of people, but you can’t create that company of people and be profitable. But if you do and you’re able to do that, it is a constant maintenance effort. It’s not just somebody’s got to wear the sweater vest. And we used to joke about that because at Guard, they hired a new VP to come in from IBM and all he wore with sweater vests and we’re like, ha, vending machine’s gone. Guy with the sweater vest is here, but somewhere it’s got to go the direction of people that know how to pivot in a spreadsheet, build pivot tables in a spreadsheet. It just has to make money. And so we can all keep our jobs. We are all getting paid really well to do cool hacker stuff, but in the end and the end of business has to succeed. But back to your point, the industry was moving that way because as you mentioned, Symantec, McAfee, IBM purchased those companies and those were corporate entities that were structured. They knew how to make money and they knew how to return money to their investors or stockholders depending on whoever it was. It was proven business cases. It was the emergence of security product time. And so most people that I knew from our industry then went directly into product. And so it was really cool actually developing solutions instead of just providing solutions.
So that’s when a lot of the creativity really took off. Martin Resh is a good example of that. He took an open source, open source software and built, one could say built an industry around this ideal, right?

Nathan Sportsman:
This is going from snort to source, source, fire, fire,

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Right? I talked to him recently in Las Vegas, and we were reminiscing. He was like, you wouldn’t believe my first five meetings with venture capitalists pitching this idea of taking open source software and making it into a commercial business. Now, I remember Red Hat had done this already, right? They had gone from an open source operating system and turned it into a business. So the basics of the idea was there, but not for a real product. And so a lot of people went to work for Marty or not. A lot of people. Some people went to work for Marty, my former business partner, Jed Hale, Jeff, Nathan, all these guys were working in Marty’s living room developing this product. Other people started up, Marcus Rainham had his all, the whole product Rush took off around this time. So while we did transfer out of the services, a lot of the really creative bright people went to work in the product industry then.

Nathan Sportsman:
And like you said, the hacking starts to get on your own time, right? You’re kind of doing it off hours. And so is that where the inception of the Honeynet project came from? You needed a mission, you needed to focus back to the roots, and you started to build that off on your own time. That’s

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Exactly when it did start. During that transformation, Lance Spitzner, the founder of the Honeynet Project, started this. It wasn’t even a nonprofit when he started, and he just discovered he was a tank commander in the army. He wasn’t cyber, I guess, but he was very much a computer security focused type person. After he got out, I think he worked for Sun, sun Microsystems. And his idea of instrumenting a computer to be vulnerable in order to be broken into and record the tool tactics techniques of the attacker, and then release that information to the security industry free of charge, was just a notion to help to give back

Nathan Sportsman:
A noble project. And that’s how our relationship started. You were holding, I guess, a local chapter meeting in Austin, and I got to meet you through Ryan W. Smith. He brought me and I got to see what you guys were up to, and it is a noble project

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
You hosted at your office. Thank you.

Nathan Sportsman:
That’s right. Well, we were so small at the time in it was a virtual office

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
That’s right

Nathan Sportsman:
In it was a virtual office we rent in a conference room. That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. And so with such a noble project, why this whole ELA Project Mayhem, where they started going after everyone, why would they go after the Honeynet project and start trying to hack everyone, all the researchers and stuff? I don’t get that.

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
I think initially it’s because they were afraid of being identified,
Being attributed to the things that they were doing. But then it turned into trying to discredit the people. Me, everyone that was involved in doing it by mocking or hacking us back or saying their abilities to do this are low. Personally, we can do this to them. How can you trust them? And then I don’t even know why they stopped one day, but I have a feeling that some of them might’ve been arrested. I don’t know. But it just one day after publicly, now the kids call it doxy, getting doxed and home addresses putting out places. And

Nathan Sportsman:
That’s what I remember reading about was it got very personalized, and whether it was honeynet or people from Wu or Kevin, they were breaking into their systems and then they were publicly doxing the information.

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
They were calling it White Hat Hate or something like that. I still have a PDF of the map that they drew, identifying our online handle to our real name and then to the companies we worked for. It was like this whole, Ooh, we’re exposing these companies for hiring these horrible people that are doing good things. It never really made sense. A lot of it was mischief. They were younger. And the ironic twist of fate is they were being the counter now. They were being the counter.

Nathan Sportsman:
They were the new counterculture,

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
The counterculture, anarchist, just for mayhem. Right?

Nathan Sportsman:
And so from Honey Net Project, you found mission, again, you’re starting to work on something on your own time, nonprofit, and again, that’s super commendable, but the industry is starting to change behind you. You’re seeing things get professionalized, and so ultimately, from what I understand, you decide to actually start your own company, the Logan Group, is that right after you left kind of Garden? Verizon?

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Yeah. I went to work very briefly, less than a year for a product company in Houston, Texas called Penta Safe. They were originally an as 400 security company, but they had pivoted and written agents, and it would be asset management now as we would call it. But anyway, it was a great company. Lee Kushner, the infamous InfoSec recruiter to the Stars found me a position there. And the one big takeaway I have from that short, I think it was maybe even 10 months of working there, is the way you could run a company that size, it was three or 400 people at that point. They’d come out of almost a Steve Jobs garage type setup, and they brought Doug Irwin on after the fact and all this. But he fostered a sense of inclusiveness and responsibility, whether it was your job or not. I was manager of research and development.
We’re writing security signatures and this kind of thing. But if we identified an opportunity that we’re going to lose, for instance, agenda items, what opportunities do we have? Where are they going? Where are we going? Doug would ask the person, VP of sales or whoever’s in charge, what’s missing in this opportunity? What do we need? You need an expert in insecurity on this thing, Logan, go with him. Or he would say to his assistant, we’re going to see that client tomorrow, that potential opportunity. It’s my job, the CEO, to make sure we get that over the line. Not Why didn’t you close your quota? It was making sure the company function as a product sales company. And it was at that point, I felt like I had worked for the right people throughout the past seven, eight years that I now knew how to gain traction with customers for services and made enough good relationships with people that had started product companies, which we discussed when we were on the rise, that I could start my own company.
And so I started the Logan Group and I had two business partners when I started Adam O’Donnell and Jed Hale. And we slowly built our client base up over the first two years of both product and services companies. We had the pleasure of landing some really big up and coming companies, Sourcefire, Marty Rush’s Company, Foundstone we’re developing a product. We helped them write some of their scripting language. We did the 3D visualization engine for Sourcefire and a couple of other product companies that we did some work for in the security space, which are NDA kind of thing

Nathan Sportsman:
Is Java man. And so that CDC Hale was he also somehow it

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Was Honey net project, honey net

Nathan Sportsman:
Projects. And so these friendships form into business relationships and you just continue on with these people.

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
And the people that came to work for me at the Logan Group were also out of various groups of people that I met. Yeah, that’s

Nathan Sportsman:
Awesome. Yeah. And so the Logan Group, you’re doing these really cool projects. You’re also doing ’em for folks that whether it’s found Stone or were Smart and Martin Rash, and is it kind of getting back to mission, getting back to the fun and focusing on things that matter? How long did you support that in the Logan Group? You had a pretty long run. Like 15?

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Yeah, 13, 14.

Nathan Sportsman:
13, 14 years.

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
It depends. I mean, Logan Group still exists, but actively, yeah, 13, 14 years, which rolled me into my next gig. I took some time off to take care of a little flood incident that occurred down in Wemberley, Texas around 2006.

Nathan Sportsman:
I think that was the next time we saw each other.

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
16, sorry. Yeah, 2016.
And took some time off and rebuilt and rebuilt, rebuilt everything. And then my old Facebook client from when I had the Logan Group, the former chief security officer came calling and told me he was building this cool new company and the whole company was built on mission and he hooked me. And so I went to work for him for Max Kelly, and we proceeded to build a very special mission oriented cybersecurity company. And while we were doing so, we were able to build some cool products. We supported a lot of redacted, in my opinion, was unique. Max had the great idea to blend in actual boots on the ground, global investigative services alongside the cybersecurity services component. The second year of redacted, we built out a global investigation division of the company. We set upon the course of licensing a lot of the redacted analyst as private investigators in different states led by our global investigative services, which gives access to loads of data that most people don’t have access to legally and

Nathan Sportsman:
Meaning not, like you said, not this a PT from Iran or here or there. You would get it down to like it is these individuals that are responsible

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
For this. It is this person, this name, this address in Jakarta, Indonesia. They work at this mobile phone store. They are the actors. We have the first that I know of a publicized report of the Nigerian National Police arresting a 9 1 4 scammer. This actor very specifically fraudulently obtained W fours via email from a large corporate client and was busy doing the 10 99 scams filing for all this. When they brought us in, we set up an entire fake music festival in a major US city as a front, because we attributed who the guy was that had stolen this and his fraud was his part-time gig. He owned a restaurant in Lagos and he also owned a music production business. He had some terrible, terrible artists. We were bad, but we set up this music festival, fronted it, backed it everything. And had the associate producer of this festival promoter reach out directly to him to license his artist, his African Music festival, sorry, African Music Festival, to license some of his artists to play on the stage and stuff between X.
But for him to upload the artist’s music, which we paid him for legitimately, he had to install our encrypted transportation client in the 80 page EULA that he clicked yes on to install this. He legally gave us access to every device in his possession. Therefore, we could retrieve the document stolen from our client and then provide proof to the Nigerian National Police who came and arrested him and he got prison time. So we were able to do real investigation work and not stop with, oh yeah, it’s those people in that country. They’re untouchable because they pay off the police. That’s insane. We were back on mission at Redacted. We had the people that came out of various intelligence agencies that do this on Nationwide, these Potemkin Village type operations. We had analysts and linguists, and it was just a remarkable place to work.

Nathan Sportsman:
That is insane. I mean, that’s almost nation state level sophistication that you, you’re doing. And you mentioned attribution at the Logan Group. I read an article on you, I can’t remember if it was dark reading or Security week or whatever the case was, but it was a story about someone stealing your phone in the UK

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
IPhone. And I love that. I think it was one of the first iPhones.

Nathan Sportsman:
Can you tell that story? I don’t know how accurate the article was,

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
But

Nathan Sportsman:
I guess these skills are coming in

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Handy.

Nathan Sportsman:
Pretty

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
Good job on that. Kelly Jackson Higgins, now I think she’s the editor in chief at Dark Reading. I knew her through the Honeynet project, so this event did happen to me, but after it happened and everything occurred, I called her and just pitched the story I did to her because I thought it was funny. But my business partner, Jed Hale and I had gone to Dublin, Ireland to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Logan Group. And we went to see Roger Waters perform the wall at O2 Stadium and do the Guinness Tour and distilleries and all that kind of thing. And I actually am friends with the lead carpenter set guy that was doing Roger Waters, the Walls, a friend of mine that lives in New Orleans, and he had invited us over there, got us tickets and all that, but we were out with him and the crew at a pub the night before the concert, and it was cold and wet, Ireland.
And I had just left my phone and my jacket on the back of the chair at the pub, and somebody stole my phone, right? The next day I, oh, I know. I was also there. We were also there. We built a, Facebook was still our client. We had gone there to their Facebook offices for some meetings. But anyway, the next day when I discovered my phone was missing, I immediately started trying to figure out who it was, but no go. So I returned home and a couple of months later, I get a message on Twitter, a private message from a made up name. He’s in Ireland, he works in a mobile phone shop. He thinks they’ve found my phone, but they want to verify it’s me before they send it back to me. Could I please give him my

Nathan Sportsman:
Passcode?

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
No. It was whatever mobile me used to be, right? Yeah. Pass phrase, because they need to unlock the phone and verify it’s me. I knew what it was it a scammer, the guy that stole it or whoever had sold it to. So anyway, I played the guy along, but I instantly went to work on the Twitter name that had sent me the message, accessed some data sources that I had access to both at Twitter and Facebook. Correlated the two, find out, did some IP tracking over at Facebook, the same one at Twitter, but see which accounts used that IP in Ireland for Facebook accounts, figured out who the Facebook accounts were, which was the real ID of this guy, his sister and his mom, who all lived in the same house in Dublin. Anyway, it turned out, it turned out to, I strung him along over here on the fake Twitter thing while I was figuring out who he was.
And then finally I sent him an email that was like, look, dude, here’s who you are. Here’s where you work. This is your sister, this is your mom is, this is where she works. This is very bad. You can do one of two things. You can not give it back to me and I’ll send the cops over to pick it up for me. Or you can take it, put it in this size box, take it to the Facebook office in Dublin, drop it off because the Facebook office in Ireland has an x-ray machine for everything that goes through. So I knew that he wouldn’t F around and just leave a box or whatever. And so the security guy that worked in the Facebook Dublin office received it for me, and you got shipped it home to me. So I’d already replaced it, but it was just the sweet victory of getting someone in Ireland to spend their own damn money to send me my phone back who had stolen it from me, was just a great success. It was so much fun.

Nathan Sportsman:
That’s also insane in terms of your ability to attribute. And that’s kind of bringing us up to here. And so I have a closing question for you, which is this, warlocks, why are you doing this and what are you hoping to get out of it? And before you answer, I just want to tell you on camera just how instrumental you’ve been in all of this, the time that you’ve given towards this, not just interviewing today, but the amount of help that you’ve given, the book that you just gave and just everything else you’ve been, I know we’ve known each other for a long time. And dude, it’s not just the time. It’s the network where you’re bringing in your network through all these facets, these people that you’ve known for 20 years, these relationships are very important to you, and you’re just so giving in all of it. And number one, thank you. But number two, why are you doing this? What are you hoping to get out of Warlock? What are you hoping that this will become?

sangfroid aka Ralph Logan:
First off, thanks. I really appreciate that. When you initially approached me about the project, I thought about it and I thought, there’ve been documentaries done. There’s exposes, there’s been good, bad, poorly funded. I mean, we’re in the age of TikTok, who knows what it may be. But I thought about it and to gush a little bit back to you, to give you some credit, you’re one of the most altruistic, honest people in this industry, and I thought about what you’ve built with Pretorian, what you’ve done. You’ve always had your level of standards for not only yourself and your services, but you’ve built out across your company. And so I gave it more thought because of who you are than what you’re creating. And so when I realized that you were going to give the same amount of dedication and honesty to this project as you do the other things that I’ve seen you throughout our relationship, I decided that it would be worth my time. So I started thinking about how I could use myself to help you in this project.
And my Rolodex, kids, a Rolodex is an old card file that we use to keep addresses, inform how I could use my network to assist you. Because thinking on it more and reflecting on what I was going to say to you or how we were going to interact about these things, I had these brilliant moments of colorful remembrances. Most of them didn’t even come up during the interview, but some did. And some have yet to come out and they still might, we’ll see, I don’t know. But more for me, it wasn’t being able to tell my story. I wanted to tell my story so others will tell theirs because this amazing, all these different people’s experiences and paths and journeys into and throughout cybersecurity, I’m hoping this project can put ’em together in this just, I think it’s going to be a brilliant mosaic of what our industry came out of, how it transformed and how it all goes together in this great picture of where we are today. And we’ll transform even more and more and get more beautiful and colored and varied as we go. And I’m looking forward more to seeing other people’s experiences than telling mine. I don’t feel mine’s that exciting or interesting, but it is a perspective and it’s a perspective no one else has. And so hopefully it’ll go up there and be just a small piece of that.

Nathan Sportsman:
Well, you’ve had a big piece in all of this, and I’m just incredibly grateful for it. So thank you. Thank you.