Ep. 104 - Code Red 25th Anniversary // Marc Maiffret & Dennis Fisher

About This Episode

In this episode, James talks to Co-host Marc Maiffret, and Dennis Fisher of Decipher, to mark the 25th anniversary of the Code Red worm, one of the most consequential moments in cybersecurity history. Marc takes us back to the Friday night he and his friend and co-worker Ryan Permeh were playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater when two customer emails changed everything, leading them to discover a self-propagating worm spreading at 2,000 servers per minute and ultimately landing Marc on a call with the White House situation room and in front of Congress.

Together the three of them dig into what Code Red revealed about the state of security in 2001, from the near total absence of patch management to vendors handling vulnerability disclosures through their marketing departments, and why Marc told Congress at the time that the worm was one of the best things that could have happened to the industry. The conversation draws a striking parallel to today, as AI is compressing the vulnerability exploitation window in ways that mirror the chaos of the early internet era, and Marc warns that the industry is drifting back toward insecure by default, the exact mistake that made Code Red possible in the first place.

About Our Guests

Marc Maiffret

Chief Technology Officer

As Chief Technology Officer, Marc Maiffret is responsible for leading BeyondTrust’s product strategy and leading the global engineering organizations to address market needs in intelligent identity and access security. Maiffret is a well-known entrepreneur and executive with over 20 years of experience in security leadership at organizations such as eEye Digital Security, FireEye, SpaceX, and BeyondTrust. Maiffret founded his first company shortly after being raided by the FBI at the age of 17. As a security researcher, Marc was an early pioneer in Microsoft vulnerability research, including co-discovering and naming Code Red, the first Microsoft computer worm. Marc has presented at numerous security conferences and has testified before Congress on matters of national security. As an entrepreneur, Marc helped design and build some of the first products for Vulnerability Management, Web Application Firewalling, Endpoint Security, and Network-Based Malware Detection. Marc has written for numerous publications and is regularly sought after by media organizations to break down complex security topics.