Billy Hoffman

Background

His father is a sales consultant and his mother is a historian and a former high school social studies teacher.

Career

Hoffman created StripeSnoop, an application which analyzes data on magnetic stripes. He also created tinyDisk, a file system that runs on top of tinyURL. At Interz0ne2 in April 2003 he attempted to give an updated version of the talk with Virgil Griffith, a student from the University of Alabama, but he and Griffith were served with a cease and desist letter a few hours before giving the presentation, and then within two days this was followed up by a lawsuit from Blackboard Incorporated, alleging that Griffith and Hoffman had violated the DMCA, the Espionage and Sedition Acting, and that they had stolen trade secrets. The lawsuit was eventually settled.

In 2005, Hoffman graduated from Georgia Technical, with a degree in computer science.

He has given talks on multiple subjects at such conferences as Interz0ne, Outerz0ne, SkyDogCon, Toorcon, Black Hat Federal, PhreakNIC, FooCamp, O"Reilly Media Emerging Technology Conference, and ShmooCon. He was also invited to speak at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Hoffman is the author of the book Ajax Security, published in December 2007 by Addison Wesley Hoffman worked as a security researcher for Atlanta start-up SPI Dynamics Incorporated, and then for Hewlett-Packard, which purchased SPI Dynamics on 1 August 2007.

He now works as a web performance consultant at Zoompf.

Achievements

• He first became famous when, as a student at Georgia Technical, he discovered a security flaw in the campus magnetic Idaho card system called "BuzzCard." He gave a talk about the security flaw at the Atlanta hacker conference "Interz0ne" in Fall 2002.