Professor Giovanni Vigna

In a recent Washington Post article entitled, “A disaster foretold — and ignored”, CS Professor Giovanni Vigna offered his insight on the state of internet security.

Professor Vigna was quoted as saying, “Once you go to a Web site and download some code and it executes itself… you have a whole new type of problem. Now I have running code on your machine, and I can do all sorts of interesting things.” The professor also noted, “Hackers are like water. They always go for the path of least resistance… If you put a plug in place, they will find another crack.”

Giovanni Vigna is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California of Santa Barbara. His current research interests include malware analysis, web security, vulnerability assessment, and mobile phone security. He also edited a book on Security and Mobile Agents and authored one on Intrusion Correlation. He has been the Program Chair of the International Symposium on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection (RAID 2003), of the ISOC Symposium on Network and Distributed Systems Security (NDSS 2009), and of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in 2011. He is known for organizing and running an inter-university Capture The Flag hacking contest, called iCTF, that every year involves dozens of institutions around the world. He is a member of IEEE and ACM. 

To learn more about Professor Vigna and his work, go here.

To read the entire Washington Post article, go here.