Talk:Christopher Boyd (IT security)

Unrelated material?
First section ('Computer Security') has two paragraphs which make no reference to the person, and instead speak generally about security issues. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.114.164.41 (talk) 23:12, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

Notability
I think I'll reduce this to a stub, this guy is barely notable.

--

I'm not sure I understand why this article has been cited as being about a "non notable" individual, when the article in its last version prior to edit clearly contained numerous third party examples of the work done by this researcher, and how they would count as "notable" in the field of security or how the above (clearly trollish comment) is accepted at face value. Especially when the user

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Buyable

has a (brief) history of page vandalism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Buyable

I move for the article to be restored, this is page vandalism disguised as "editing". though a trim couldn't hurt.Ginza 10:39, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

--

Long time Wiki user, first time contributor. I was fortunate enough to attenda presentation boyd gave at the RSA exhibition in california this year, and upon searching for more information on him was surprised to find this page has had all content removed and (confusingly) replaced with a stub notice asking users to help by "expanding it" to prove the subjects notability. on the basis that the article (looking at older versions) already had plenty of secondary evidence to support the subjects "notability", it makes no sense whatsoever to....put all the same material back in again. lets put it this way, you dont get to give a talk at RSA (the worlds biggest security confrrence)in the first place without being an expert in your field, and of the 400 or so sessions given, his was the only one to recieve any sort of press coverage (EWeek, http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2092435,00.asp). that should tell you something.

in terms of notability of the work done? well, he's listed here on a list of 59 top influencers in IT at number 21:

http://www.itsecurity.com/features/top-59-influencers-itsecurity-031407/

he is also publically thanked by google on their website, with regards the work done in relation to vulnerabilities in their software:

http://www.google.com/corporate/security.html

he's a two time Microsoft MVP in security, and regularly appears in the press talking about issues of spyware and adware (most recently, the BBC website and the Times and Guardian printed newspapers):

http://vitalsecurity.org/times.pdf

his research has been referenced in at least one book:

http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Viruses-Advances-Information-Security/dp/0387302360/ref=sr_1_1/104-2216052-9354367?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1175603783&sr=8-1

his work was cited in one of the documents relating to the case involving new york attorney general VS adware vendors Direct Revenue:

http://www.benedelman.org/spyware/nyag-dr/e75.pdf

and his findings are considered notable enough to be mentioned across any number of mainstream Tech / IT sites you care to mention. I'd list them here, but whats the point as they're already available in the previous version of this page that was summararily dismissed by someone who seems to have a long history of offensive / innapropriate comments and / or page vandalism with regards pages on wikipedia.

in my opinion, the burden of proof is here on the person who removed the content from this page to establish the subjects non-notability, as opposed people like myself who have been denied this information on the basis of a whimsical decision that "this person is not notable" and then this individual seemingly flagging it for numerous problems. it almost seems like a "grudge" edit, especially as boyd has himself flagged the actions of adware vendors editing wikipedia for their own benefit:

http://www.vitalsecurity.org/2007/02/history-of-revision.html http://www.vitalsecurity.org/2007/02/history-of-revision-part-2.html

its not too hard to suppose its someone "getting their own back". For this reason, I'm reverting the edit because it smacks of drive-by page vandalism. Horrorlemon 12:43, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Links recently removed
I noticed links to both Boyds other security weblog and the company he works for have been removed and flagged as "spam"

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Christopher_Boyd&diff=prev&oldid=155910940

I thought this was rather strange and did a little more digging - the user who removed these two links ("Donnymo") has made numerous edits to pages mainly focusing on instant messenging security, and more importantly has added numerous edits where he has added information and links to a company called Akonix? heres a few, there are many others

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Instant_messaging&diff=prev&oldid=128299107 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Instant_messaging_manager&diff=prev&oldid=117410224 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Instant_messaging_manager&diff=prev&oldid=155683233

this seems to be a clear case of "dirty tricks" editing here?

Horrorlemon 11:57, 20 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Interesting. The deleted weblog link looks valuable and should be restored.  The company link is spammish, although I think you might be allowed "one free" if it's your own company and article, I'm not sure of the rule.  I restored both links; if anyone wants to re-delete the company site I won't argue.  Special:Contributions/Donnymo User:Donnymo seems to be the author of Instant messaging manager, an article that should have been speedy-deleted for the subject's non-notability, yet was apparently overlooked and lives on.  It has had several wikilinks to it added to other articles by the same Donnymo, who also adds external links to sites like  this and this.  (Linksearch results for these two links here and here.)


 * While discussing dirty tricks, don't forget this person, although he may be just a garden-variety vandal. --CliffC 13:46, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Reverting your edit with regard References / Notability
"Every reference is a news article which effectively advertises his own company."

This is plainly nonsensical - the first eight or so articles refer to finds Boyd made *before* he started working for his current company - when he was an independant researcher. Even after that, it is clearly referenced in both articles linked to (and articles about the same stories that aren't linked to but found via googling it) that Boyd either made the finds himself or was involved as the catalyst for the events that would then take place (such as being tipped off by someone with regards the Carder Botnet.).

In addition, even after working for the mentioned company, Boyd still published (and continues to publish) research that has no point of origin with his company. For example, the Zango on Myspace story linked to on the very Wiki article you're referring to? 100% independant of research associated with his "parent company". The persual of the people behind the scam, and the subsequent reveal that Zango were sending out newsletters saying how webmasters could profit from Myspace? Published on his personal blog. The Yapbrowser story linked to on the wiki page you're referring to? Again, it originated from his personal blog. The hacker known as "Yogangsta50" who was "chased offline" after he was tracked down to a site revealing his name and photograph?

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/19/2044244&threshold=-1

The initial find of the executable was detailed on his company blog, and the subsequent chase and takedown of the hacker (which is what made the story interesting in the first place) was another one from his personal blog. His endless stream of recent writeups concerned with taking down large groups of game crackers / phishers? It appears nowhere else other than on his personal site.

If news sites mention the finds, they're obviously more likely to call him "Chris Boyd, Facetime" than "Paperghost" because that would be pretty weird for mainstream press to do that, right? Even in the context of working for his company, he's still clearly credited with making the finds, from the Orkut worm in 2006 to the Skype worm that could jump across networks. Its about as spurious as you can get to accuse his research of simply being adverts for his company purely because he's going to be referred to by his name and job title in the bulk of those pieces.

This article is actually well out of date, and missing lots of more recent finds by the researcher in question. In fact, from his blog there's a link to this site:

http://cboyd.co.uk/

Which details a lot more findings for the year 2007. A quick readthrough provides links to more articles that credit Boyd with more finds off the back of his research, both related to his company and individual work.

"As a spokesperson for this company, would it not be expected that his name would appear as a researcher?"

If he found the thing being discussed, then yes, of course his name would appear. As he is in fact credited with these things, why are you suprised that he is the one being questioned about his finds and not somebody else?

"To be honest the notability of this individual is stretching a little thing."

As far as I'm aware, the article was already rated "Start class" (or something similar) after a similar discussion following what appeared to be drive-by page vandalism. It seems the sensible thing to do if questioning "notability" would be to mention it on the page, but not change the notability already established for the page without providing reasonable justification (as per the Assessment FAQ), however what you have "provided" is a collection of (at best) faulty assumptions, which makes it look less like a genuine edit and more like another piece of drive-by vandalism. For this reason, I'm reverting your changes as everything you've said is either incorrect (asserting that there is no mention of "independant research" when the first half of the links provided are just that) or really weird logic (being surprised that news articles would indeed refer to him as "chris boyd of X company" as opposed naming him without giving any context to what he does and who he does it for).

In fact, from a quick check of your User Talk page, you seem to be applying rather haphazard "edits" to a number of security specialist pages - combined with the frankly bizarre comment left there ("I am working my way through the computer security specialists list. Wow there are a lot of self promoting individuals.") which simply makes you sound like someone with a grudge of some description, as opposed to making rational, non-emotional edits that would offer some additional value to the articles edited. Are you claiming the inviduals you've edited are "self promoting" outside of Wikipedia? On Wikipedia itself? How so? Can you provide some factual evidence of this, or is it merely another assumption?

On the Sarah Gordon page, you've simply said "nothing here notable" and flagged it with a notability tag, without providing anything in the way of reasoning or verification which would substantiate your claim. "Two of the first concept Viruses for Microsoft products" sounds interesting enough to be notable to me.

Did you look into this to help the community to establish the worth of this information? Or simply dismiss all information there as "not notable?" purely for the sake of it? A quick google search, and:

http://www.research.ibm.com/antivirus/timeline.htm#1996

"Still another notable virus caught the attention of the anti-virus marketing community. This was Laroux. Laroux is notable as the first virus to successfully infect Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. It was first discovered and analyzed by Sarah Gordon of Command Software Systems."

The first virus to infect Excel spreadsheets sounds notable to me.

Horrorlemon (talk) 14:15, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

This article needs a major overhaul, its too long and somewhat out of date (it stops at 2006 and seems to focus on a lot of material from quite some time ago at length). As a starting point, I've removed some odd pieces of "fluff" (unsubstantiated claims regarding his degree, the individual aspects of said degree) and information related to him being a "staff writer" for an earlier version of the website he currently runs. I couldn't find anything on that either, and it doesn't seem particularly interesting or noteworthy, especially as the article is so long to begin with. I'll try and have a think about how this article can be reduced in length (sorely needed) and brought more up to date. Suggestions welcome!

Ginza (talk) 00:28, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Notability
I do not see the article clearly asserting notability, many of the references do not mention Boyd at all, and there are remarkably few mentions of this person on Google Book Search, Google Scholar, etc. The discussion above strongly suggests that this ia a vanity page. Mousepad9 (talk) 10:47, 14 December 2008 (UTC)


 * I've removed the tag placed by this first-day user, the assertation of notability is clear. If he would read this page more closely (especially the edit history of the first "contributor"), he'll see that much of it deals with dirty-tricks editing to discredit Boyd.  If he'll read the article references more closely, I think he'll find that if they don't mention Boyd by name, they mention his  Paperghost alias, or his web site.  --CliffC (talk) 16:41, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
 * It feels odd being addressed in third-person, but the notability is asserted by having an MVP, being cited in "at least" one book, being quoted in a handful of articles, etc - which does not clearly meet the criteria as applied to IT. Also, many of the references provided do not mention Boyd at all, or do not establish any further notability (for example, neither [2] not [3] are related to the claim of personal contributions made in section titled 'Computer security'). Most biographies in this category with similar problems have notability templates attached to them. I am not really willing to argue here, but the article seems superficially valid, but in dire need of improvements at the very least. Mousepad9 (talk) 20:19, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Is it just me, or does this page have lots of freshly registered users popping up claiming it lacks "notability" on a regular basis?

The person above mentions Google Scholar and books, yet Boyds work has never, ever been about books or "journal publishing". He "simply" finds new and interesting types of net fraud, then writes about it on blogs and talk about it at security conferences. I'm not going into this again, because it's already been covered at length above.

As for vanity pages, the person who created this page originally - "Mike1901" - seems to be someone who helped fix computer infections and take part on security community forums. It doesn't seem likely that Boyd and Mike1901 are the same person, so I highly doubt this is a vanity page.

It's not hard to find references to Boyd and security, security finds, issues and scams in newspapers and TV, and across news sites and blogs. It's also not too difficult to find praise for his research from an endless stream of prominent security entities such as Mikko Hypnonen, Alex Eckelberry, Ben Edelman et al. Here's a list of information from one of his personal websites, took me all of ten seconds. I've removed a couple of things not relevant to things in security that he specifically found which generated press attention and debate, and this is what you're left with.

2007

Porn browser comes with rootkit

Skype worm jumps to icq, msn

Hacker traced back to base and chased offline

new type of 419 scam targeting property buyers

compromised data leads to middle east hack tool

2008

hidden network solutions page compromised

hijacked accounts used to spread torture pictures

myspace hack reveals profile visitors

Homer Simpson and the Kimya Botnet

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2221476/homer-simpson-accused-spreading

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?no_d2=1&sid=08/07/12/1157244

Adware on pirate movie site

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/18/dark_knight_zango_affiliate_gateway/

Phish page logs you into real website

Fake Batman MMORPG leads to Adware Install

http://blog.newsarama.com/2008/09/08/the-lightning-round-monday-7/

http://techdirt.com/articles/20080908/0341372202.shtml

http://kotaku.com/5049102/a-batman-mmorpg--er-no-actually

Imageshack flaw exposes IP address of uploaders

twitter profiles target Orkut users

Haul of 5000 stolen Ebay accounts found

Those combined with the finds already listed for 05 and 06 make the case for non-notability seem ludicrous.

Apologies for yet another long, long post, but I'm appreciative of Boyds work and (being familiar with this "notability" issue brought out every so often) I tend to stockpile references and information a lot more than I used to for these occasions.

It seems the biggest problem isn't that there's not enough material related to Boyds research - its that there's too much, and its almost impossible to present the above on a condensed wiki page, but then I've already mentioned this too. I tried to tackle the problem a while ago, and it bested me - if anyone wants to take a shot at it, go for it!

I do agree that the External Links section needs to be edited or removed - links to David Lawrence, Ben Edelman websites are well and good, but why on earth do the links point to the main URLs instead of pages that actually reference the subject of the wiki page in some way?

Ginza (talk) 15:34, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

"and may be the greatest hero in English history"?!? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.66.198.61 (talk) 14:30, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

--Why even mention CWS? He had absolutly nothing to do with it and was nowhere around in the community when it was discovered, or when the tools to remove it were created. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.65.41.246 (talk) 03:15, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

External links modified
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External links modified (January 2018)
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