He accepts the distinction with humility.
He’s proud of a technique he recently developed that standardizes the distribution and management of encryption keys for the Secure Shell Protocol while also hardening security.īut his passion for password cracking has forever labeled him as the “password person” inside X-Force Red. I can tell you things about those hobbies you’ve never heard of.” Like many neurodiverse people, he said, “I’m terrible with things I don’t have an interest in, but I collect hobbies like being glider pilot, scuba diver and pyrotechnics. “I take a lot of things literally and jokes can fly over my head. “I have a lot of masking tendencies,” he said. His hacker team, The Church of Wifi, has won the Hacker Jeopardy! competition at the DefCon conference for the past two years.ĭespite being in the spotlight, Heywood admits that he continues to wrestle with some aspects of his autism. He became a frequent speaker at the now-defunct Derb圜on security conference where he was better-known by his online handle, EvilMog. IBM offered him not only the opportunity to immerse himself in a field he loved but also to discuss his work freely at conferences and events. There followed several years at a large financial services firm where the work was interesting but kept under tight wraps.
“No one ever intended to have TV streamed over satellite, over an IP network and into a remote base in Afghanistan.” On the road “I actually had to rely on a lot of hackerlike skills to make things do what they were never intended to do,” he told the Toronto Globe and Mail. “I did the first year in six months, knocked that out of the park and started doing low-level IT things,” he said.Īn early job at an IT contractor sent him on back-to-back trips to Afghanistan to set up TV entertainment and videoconferencing systems in remote regions. While working in a potato chip factory in his mid-20s, he suffered a dislocated shoulder that forced him out of his job and into a retraining program that happened to include cybersecurity.
Hoping to build his social skills, he found early work as a telemarketer, followed by a series of manual labor jobs. Heywood didn’t start out looking for a career in cybersecurity. “Humans can’t create a password to save their lives,” he said.Īs the go-to person on passwords within X-Force Red, Heywood specializes in working with clients to audit authentication credentials used by system administrators and other critical information technology staff to identify the most vulnerable targets. He also has an uncanny ability to identify the song and quote references that frequently turn up. For example, he can recognize keyboard patterns such as “zaq12ws” that users think are hard to guess but that are easy marks for cybercriminals who know what to look for. “My ability to see patterns in data just clicked,” he said. Heywood got hooked on password cracking early in his cybersecurity studies. And as a member of IBM Corp.’s X-Force Red, an elite team that organizations hire to break into their computers and identify critical vulnerabilities, he has found a place to thrive. As an ethical hacker, Heywood specializes in finding patterns that humans and even computers would overlook. “You need to find people who are 100% ethical but can think like a criminal,” he said. But I never used my skills for something other than good.”ĭifferent perspectives are an asset in a field where the best prevention is to think like your adversary.
“I learned how to violate the spirit without violating the letter. “I always looked at the rules and found ways around them,” Heywood said in an interview with SiliconANGLE. In cybersecurity, he has since found a community of people who, like him, thrive for their ability to see the world differently. When Heywood was diagnosed with a high-functioning form of what was then called Asperger’s syndrome as a teenager, he finally understood the challenges he faced and also the potential of some of his extraordinary capabilities. Relatively little was known about autism at the time. His condition confounded school officials. Yet he was able to solve math and computer science problems far beyond his grade level. His handwriting was so bad that it often took hours to write a single page. As an elementary school student in the Canadian city of Calgary in Alberta, Dustin Heywood could barely grip a pencil.