Daniel Miessler is a recognized cybersecurity expert and writer with 20 years in Information Security. His experience ranges from technical assessment and implementation, to executive level advisory services consulting, to building and running industry-leading security programs.
His 20 years of experience in security ranges from the vibrant startup ecosystem in his birthplace of Silicon Valley, to working with many of the top 100 worldwide companies. He frequently gives talks and participates in panels around the world, and his work and commentary have been featured in dozens of the world’s leading publications.
Relevant presence data
Daniel dislikes speaking about himself in the third person.
September 2019
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- Twitter: @danielmiessler, ~95K followers, verified by Twitter in 2016.
Website: danielmiessler.com, active since 1999, over 2,000 pieces, monthly visitors ~450K, one of the highest rated personal sites in the world—with a Global Alexa rank around 90,000, and a US Alexa rank around 30,000.
Podcast: The Unsupervised Learning podcast has been going since 2015, and has been rated as one of the top security podcasts for the last several years. The podcast is downloaded approximately 15,000 times a month according to Omnystudio.
The podcast and newsletter are two parts of the same show.
- Newsletter: The Unsupervised Learning newsletter has been running since 2015, and is widely popular within the security and tech industry. It reaches approximately 30,000 subscribers and has open and clickrates far above the industry average (~30%/~11% for standard subscribers, and ~75%/50% for members), as measured by MailChimp.
- Speaking: 2018 Keynote Speaker at the Rocky Mountain Information Security Conference (RMISC), 2016-2018 AppSec California OWASP Conference, DEFCON 23 (IoT Village), BlackHat 2015 (Arsenal), OWASP AppSec USA, RSA USA (2015, 2016, and 2017), many, many more
Also listed on a list of people who gag when talking about themselves being on lists.
- Recognition: Listed among Top 50 InfoSec influencers by DigitalGuardian in 2018, listed as the top InfoSec thought leader in this InfoSec Institute list, listed as the top InfoSec influencer on Onalytica’s 2016 InfoSec Influencers List.
- Projects: 2015: Launched the Unsupervised Learning podcast and newsletter, which has around 20,000 followers, 2018: Founder and CEO of the HELIOS company, in the Attack Surface Monitoring space, Creator and leader of the OWASP IoT Security Project, Creator and leader of the SecLists Project, Consistent blogger at danielmiessler.com for nearly 20 years, Coverage of tech conferences often highly commented on by other top industry players, Active coder on GitHub, with over 1K followers, Other projects.
Personal introduction from the author
The above was for media and marketing. This is where my real /about starts.
I’ll start by saying that if you’ve not tried to summarize yourself in this way—i.e., via some sort of “about me” page—you should try it. It requires a considerable degree of introspection, and is more difficult and interesting than it seems.
My name is Daniel Miessler (mē’slûr) and I’m an information security professional and writer born, raised, and living in the San Francisco Bay Area. I started this site in 1999 as a platform for collecting technical knowledge. Today it is my most important life project, with over 2,500 essays, posts, tutorials, articles, and other types of content.
In fact, it’s less of a project and more like an avatar, or even a child. It is where I put both my time and my (weak) hopes for some measure of immortality. While most see their websites as a place to release pressure via rant, or to project a presence, I use mine as a means of organizing everything I have learned and want to learn, and then as a way to share those things with others.
Interests
I love modeling the world.
My main intellectual passion in life reduces nicely to the following:
- Learning interesting things about how the world works, capturing them, articulating them, and documenting them.
- Solving real-world problems using this organized knowledge.
- Sharing and discussing with others both the models and how they can be used to affect change.
Said differently, I enjoy finding patterns in things, constructing models for how the world works, and then discussing, sharing, and using that information to improve the world in some way. As for activities, I mostly enjoy cross-discipline reading and writing that furthers my reality-modeling passions mentioned above.
Specifically, I read a lot about evolutionary biology/psychology, existentialism, logic, rhetoric, dialectic, history, sociology, statistics, technology, politics, and security. I also have a strong passion for creative and artistic things. I get extreme pleasure from typography, data visualization, graphic design, and pretty much anything that’s visually interesting or beautiful.
I am looking at getting more into art creation of my own, focussed around drawing diagrams, cartoons, and possibly even actual expressive art pieces. I read a lot—mostly in the topics above—but I do enjoy fiction occasionally. When I do it’s usually classics, fantasy, and sci-fi.
When I read a good book I capture it on my Reading page. I also maintain lists of my Projects and my Ideas, if you’d like to look at those. If anything, I hope they inspire you to capture and explore your own life in a similar way.
Philosophy
I am an atheist who takes an Absurdist approach to life, including the search for meaning and our lack of free will.
In short, there is no god, we don’t have free will, and there is no intrinsic meaning in the universe—but I see this as a starting point rather than an end. Rather than recoil from this, people should accept it honestly and rejoice in the potential beauty of human experience.
In doing so we can create our own meaning structure based on shared conscious experience rather than fantasy. In my opinion, morality is not about finding a pre-existing truth, but instead about discovering the best way to conduct ourselves in order to reduce suffering and increase happiness for conscious creatures (Russell, Harris).
Lists
Peoples’ lists are full of insights about them, and for that reason they’re good to include on a page like this. They help people find common interests. Here are some of mine.
Contact
So that’s a bit about me. If you have a question, a comment, or if you just want to say hello, you can find me on Twitter, on GitHub, or via email. If you want to look around, here’s a good place to start.
I welcome you to explore, and I hope you find something here worth your time.
Notes
- I strongly dislike speaking of myself and my work in this way, and I used to have this page hidden away just for responding to media inquiries. But with the recent changes to Google’s algorithms (circa September 2018) that focus on fighting fake news and establishing credibility, it’s now become necessary to demonstrate clearly who you are and why someone should listen to you with everything you write. So my apologies for this reading like a case study in narcissism.