Gordon Lyon

Gordon Lyon
Lyon in San Francisco, California
Residence	Palo Alto, California
Other names	Fyodor Vaskovich
Known for	Nmap
Website	http://insecure.org/fyodor/

Gordon Lyon (also known by his pseudonym Fyodor Vaskovich) is a network security expert,open source programmer, writer, and hacker. He authored the open source Nmap Security Scanner and numerous books, web sites, and technical papers focusing on network security. Lyon is a founding member of the Honeynet Project and was Vice President of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.

Lyon has been active in the network security community since the mid-1990s. His handle, Fyodor, was taken from Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Most of his programming is done in the C, C++, and Perl programming languages. He lives in Palo Alto, California.

In December 2011 Lyon published his strong dislike of the way Download.com started bundling grayware with their installation managers and concerns over the bundled software, causing many people to spread the post on social networks, and a few dozen media reports. The main problem is the confusion between Download.com-offered content and software offered by original authors; the accusations included deception as well as copyright and trademark violation.

Lyon has lost control of the Nmap Sourceforge page, with Sourceforge taking over the project's page and offering adware wrapped download bundles.

Lyon maintains several network security web sites:

Lyon has written and co-authored several books:

Public interviews with Lyon/Vaskovich have been posted by SecurityFocus, Slashdot, Zone-H, TuxJournal, Safemode, and Google. Many of these provide more personal details than his official bio page does.