Christopher Hadnagy

Christopher James Hadnagy is an American author, IT-entrepreneur and information technology security consultant. Hadnagy is known for IT security education and establishing Innocent Lives Foundation, an organization that helps tracking and identifying child trafficking. Hadnagy is a founder of Social-Engineer.Org, an information technology and educational organization in the field of computer security headquartered in Orlando, Florida. He is also an author of a number of publications such as Social-Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking and Unmasking the Social Engineer: The Human Element of Security.

Career

IT Entrepreneurship

In 2009, Hadnagy founded Social-Engineer, LLC. (2009), a company providing education and training courses in cyber security and defense against black hat hacking. The company's main focus has been on educating firms on the methods used by malicious attackers. The company has applied various methods of defending computer security systems in order to identify vulnerabilities and maintain sustainable levels of security. Hadnagy established the social engineering penetration testing framework, providing a repository of information for security professionals. The hub resources include The Social-Engineer.Org Podcast and The Social-Engineer newsletter.

Hadnagy also created a social engineering training course and certification, Advanced Practical Social Engineering, attended by law enforcement, military, and private sector professionals. Hadnagy is a graduate of Paul Ekman’s courses in microexpressions and holds certifications as an Offensive Security Certified Professional (OSCP) and an Offensive Security Wireless Professional (OSWP).

Community involvement and crime prevention against children

In 2017, Christopher Hadnagy founded Innocent Lives Foundation, an organization with the focus on preventing crimes against children, including child trafficking, pedophilia and child pornography production. The organization applies various security techniques such as seeking the assistance of information security specialists, utilizing date from open-source intelligence (OSINT) and collaborating with law enforcement. The foundation has been supported by a number of American public figures.

Books reception

Hadnagy's books received generally positive reviews from the industry critics and reviewers. According to Ben Rothke from the Cybersecurity Canon: "Unmasking the Social Engineer: The Human Element of Security helps a reader to understand that "Ensuring that social engineering is part of the overall information security program is no longer an option". Slashdot website concludes:"One can sum up all of Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking in two sentences from page 297, where author Christopher Hadnagy writes 'tools are an important aspect of social engineering, but they do not make the social engineer. A tool alone is useless; but the knowledge of how to leverage and utilize that tool is invaluable.' Far too many people think that information security and data protection is simply about running tools, without understanding how to use them. In this book, Hadnagy shows how crucial the human element is within information security'." Maria Patricia Prandini from Isaca Journal Book Reviews praised the book Phishing Dark Waters: The Offensive and Defensive Sides of Malicious E-mails for detailed analysis of cyber security techniques and noticed that the book is available to a wide readership, and not only professionals in IT industry.