Gordon Lyon


Gordon Lyon is a network security expert. Lyon created Nmap, and has written numerous books, web sites, and technical papers about network security. He is a founding member of the Honeynet Project and was Vice President of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.

Personal life

Lyon has been active in the network security community since the mid-1990s. His handle, Fyodor, was taken from Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Most of his programming is done in the C, C++, and Perl programming languages.

Opposition to grayware

In December 2011 Lyon published his strong dislike of the way Download.com started bundling grayware with their installation managers and concerns over the bundled software, causing many people to spread the post on social networks, and a few dozen media reports. The main problem is the confusion between Download.com-offered content and software offered by original authors; the accusations included deception as well as copyright and trademark violation.
Lyon lost control of the Nmap Sourceforge page in 2015, with Sourceforge taking over the project's page and offering adware wrapped download bundles. Currently the original Sourceforge page does no longer contain any files
but the Sourceforge "mirror" page used to hijack the Nmap account redirects to the official https://nmap.org/ site now.

Web sites

Lyon maintains several network security web sites:
Lyon has written and co-authored several books:
Public interviews with Lyon/Vaskovich have been posted by SecurityFocus, Slashdot, Zone-H, TuxJournal, Safemode, and Google. Many of these provide more personal details than his official bio page does.

Conferences

Lyon attends and speaks at many security conferences. He has presented at DEFCON, CanSecWest, FOSDEM, IT Security World, Security Masters' Dojo, ShmooCon, IT-Defense, SFOBug, and others.