The author

I have to tell you my origin story. Because you should know where we are going if you join me by reading this book. I hope it is not boring as no radioactive spiders are involved….

Trouble shooter and one-man-team somehow happened to be my role. This and team expert for security. I am a software developer and engineer who also took the role of architect/project manager in security related projects. Which gave me a good and wide perspective on things in the IT world.

After studying Computer Science (Dipl. Ing FH at University Ravensburg Weingarten, a German title) I went to Avira. An Anti-Virus/Endpoint bolt-on-security company. I handled core detection projects as part of teams. I was focused on the engineering/architect and developer roles. Amongst the things I did is:

  • An AI SPAM filter in C: String processing in C….
  • A full Anti-Virus engine. Cross-compilable. For WinCE, Linux, PalmOS and Symbian. C
  • A generic module to detect malware in homepages. Building a kind of DOM. String processing. In C.
  • Management security consulting
  • Browser extension development - self learning phishing detection. JavaScript
  • A government founded research project:
    • Split an OS into several virtual machines for segmentation
    • Scan into these virtual machines without installing anything (Volatility)
    • Classify malware based on behaviour (Cuckoo Sandbox)
  • Create the architecture of a security/privacy focused Chromium based browser
  • Went to the Embedded and IoT world at Feo, another company
  • Mvoing to Avast I wrote a simulation environment to experiment with advanced attacks named PurpleDome

Right in the middle of doing all those things I started to sort my knowledge and experience. Resulting in this book.

Currently I am Lead Security expert at Primion where I can use all my knowledge.

You can reach me

  • On Twitter: @ThorstenSick
  • On Mastodon: @thorsi@chaos.social

Thorsten Sick

The origin story: External brain

This book was already written once. As my external brain. Just for me. I collect my knowledge in “external brains” a private wiki. My security knowledge external-brain just grew to a stage where I thought “well, you just wrote a book”. And after finding leanpub which fits my style of tackling projects I decided I can transfer my external brain (written for me) into a book (written for tech people world wide).

And this is currently happening.

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