Welcome to High Severity

Online security is something I have always been interested in. I've been doing security consultancy and web application security testing for several years at Netcraft, helping major banks and financial institutions remain secure and immune to hackers. You may even have seen me talking about such topics on BBC News, or heard me talking about them on various BBC radio stations including the World Service.

I have spent much of the past month fervently monitoring the distributed denial of service attacks being carried out by a group called Anonymous. These attacks have successfully taken down the websites of MasterCard, Visa and PayPal, all because they were unsupportive of WikiLeaks. While I have written about these attacks in some detail on news.netcraft.com, it would be nice to have the opportunity to express my personal views without having to worry about being too formal.

So, welcome to my new blog at HighSeverity.com. I quite like the domain name. I'll be using this to discuss any interesting security topics that I come across in my spare time, and you may even get to see me spouting the occasional rant. Unless stated otherwise, all views and expressions will be mine and not those of my employer, but I shall no doubt be referring to Netcraft's rather useful services and public datasets from time to time.

My first post – excluding this one, of course – will be an in-depth interview with a prominent Anon (a member of Anonymous). If you have any suggestions for future posts, just drop me an email.