Samy Kamkar (born December 10, 1985) is an American privacy and security researcher, computer hacker and entrepreneur. At the age of 16, he dropped out of high school. One year later, he co-founded Fonality, a unified communications company based on open-source software, which raised over $46 million in private funding. In 2005, he created and released the fastest spreading virus of all time, the MySpace worm Samy, and was subsequently raided by the United States Secret Service under the Patriot Act. He also created SkyJack, a custom drone which hacks into any nearby Parrot drones allowing them to be controlled by its operator and created the Evercookie, which appeared in a top-secret NSA document revealed by Edward Snowden and on the front page of The New York Times. He has also worked with The Wall Street Journal, and discovered the illicit mobile phone tracking where the Apple iPhone, Google Android and Microsoft Windows Phone mobile devices transmit GPS and Wi-Fi information to their parent companies. His mobile research led to a series of class-action lawsuits against the companies and a privacy hearing on Capitol Hill. Kamkar has a chapter giving advice in Tim Ferriss' book Tools of Titans.
Work
Samy worm
In 2005, Kamkar released the Samy worm, the first publicly released self-propagating cross-site scripting worm, onto MySpace. The worm carried a payload that would display the string "but most of all, Samy is my hero" on a victim's profile and cause the victim to unknowingly send a friend request to Kamkar. When a user viewed that profile, they would have the payload planted on their page. Within just 20 hours of its October 4, 2005 release, over one million users had run the payload, making it the fastest spreading virus of all time. The MySpace team temporarily shut down MySpace to fix the problem that allowed the worm to operate.
In 2006, Kamkar was raided by the United States Secret Service and Electronic Crimes Task Force, expanded from the Patriot Act, for releasing the worm. After being presented with a plea bargain for no prison time, but paying a fine of $20,000 USD, serving three years of probation, working 720 hours of community service, Kamkar pled guilty to a felony charge of computer hacking in Los Angeles Superior Court. Also per the aforementioned agreement, Kamkar was allowed to keep a single computer that was not connected to a network, but explicitly prohibited from any internet access during his sentence. Since 2008, Kamkar has been doing independent computer security and privacy research and consulting.
Notable works
In 2008, after Kamkar's restriction from computers was lifted, he demonstrated weaknesses in Visa, MasterCard and Europay credit cards with near field communication (NFC) and radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips built in and released software demonstrating the ability to steal credit card information, including name, credit card number, and expiration date, wirelessly from these cards. He also released code demonstrating wireless identity theft of physical access control cards, including that of HID Global cards, using RFID with the use of only a credit card sized device, removing the need for any computer to be connected.
In 2010, Kamkar traveled to more than a dozen countries speaking about his mobile security research and weaknesses he discovered from his cryptanalysis of the PHP programming language, including speaking at some of the largest annual hacker conventions in the world such as DEF CON, Black Hat Briefings and ToorCon.
In late 2010, Kamkar traveled to Bratislava to attend Faraday Hack Day to help expose political and corporate corruption within Slovakia's government.
In early 2011, Kamkar joined the Board of Directors of Brave New Software, a non-profit organization originally funded by a multimillion-dollar U.S. State Department grant. The nonprofit is responsible for creating uProxy with the University of Washington and Google Ideas, a browser extension intended to allow users in repressive regimes to access the Internet without being monitored. The nonprofit also created Lantern, a network designed to circumvent Internet censorship and defeat the suppression of digital information and freedom of speech.