Jeffrey Carpenter and Dan Kaminsky newly inducted into FIRST's Incident Response Hall of Fame

Jeffrey and Dan join past inductees Ian Cook, Don Stikvoort, and Klaus-Peter Kossakowski

July 1st, 2021 – Jeffrey Carpenter and (posthumously) Dan Kaminsky are this year's new inductees of FIRST's Incident Response Hall of Fame. Hall of Fame nominations come from past inductees; members of the FIRST Board of directors; every representative, secondary representative of a team member; and FIRST liaison members and Individuals in the Incident Response community.

Jeffrey Carpenter has dedicated more than 30 years to improving the state of information security. In 1995, Jeffrey joined the CERT® Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute, initially as an incident response analyst, then five years later managing more than 50 technical individuals. He was instrumental in helping the U.S. Department of Defence and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security create teams to exchange incident information and indicators between government and critical infrastructure organizations. He also worked closely with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on the formation of US-CERT, the national computer security incident response team (CSIRT) for the United States.

Jeffrey helped many other governments and regional organizations around the world establish national incident response capabilities. He founded a successful annual conference for technical staff working for CSIRTs with national responsibility to promote collaboration among these organizations. Jeffrey's active involvement in the incident response community over the years has included presenting in various forums and serving on Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) committees and working groups. Jeffrey currently is the Secureworks Senior Director of Incident Response Consulting and Threat Intelligence.

Jeffrey says: "I am humbled by this honor. This recognition also reflects the efforts of my former colleagues at the CERT Coordination Center to advance the incident response community, for I could not have had any success without them. In addition, it is a privilege to be inducted with my friend Dan Kaminsky, whose work in incident response and product security impacted so many people. We miss him dearly."

Dan Kaminsky (1979 – 2021) was a noted American security researcher - best known for his work finding a critical flaw in the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS) and leading what became the largest synchronized fix to the Internet infrastructure of all time in 2008. He was also known for being a great human - helping colleagues, friends, and community members attend events, working on many health apps, assisting color-blind people, hearing aid technology and telemedicine, and fighting as a privacy rights advocate. His ethos was to do things because they were the right thing to do, not because they would elicit financial gain.

Dan was co-founder and chief scientist of WhiteOps (recently renamed Human) and spent his career advising several Fortune 500 companies such as Cisco, Avaya, and Microsoft on their cybersecurity. In addition, Dan spent three years working with Microsoft on their Vista, Server 2008, and Windows 7 releases.

Many FIRST members are aware of Dan - some had the privilege of meeting and working with him. All of us will miss him and the energy, creativity, curiosity, and, above all, the fun he brought to our world.

The New York Times labeled him an "Internet security savior" - an honorific too often given but, in this case, very well deserved.

Chris Gibson, CEO and Executive Director of FIRST says: "Dan’s impact and influence in our industry were enormous. His work in 2008, working on one of the largest multi-vendor, multi-stakeholder vulnerability disclosures, continues to influence how these are handled today. His work since has helped us all improve our world. People like Dan are an inspiration to all of us, and it is our honor to have him join our Incident Hall of Fame.”

Jeffrey and Dan join past inductees Ian Cook, Don Stikvoort, and Klaus-Peter Kossakowski.

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About FIRST

FIRST aspires to bring together incident response and security teams from every country across the world to ensure a safe internet for all. Founded in 1990, the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) consists of internet emergency response teams from 575 corporations, government bodies, universities and other institutions across 98 countries in the Americas, Asia, Europe, Africa, and Oceania.

For more information, visit: https://www.first.org.

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