Daniel Crowley - Research Director at IBM X-Force Red

Daniel Crowley

Research Director at IBM X-Force Red

Austin, Texas, United States

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Summary

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Rockstar

🎓

Top School

Daniel Crowley is a research-focused security leader with 11+ years of hands-on experience finding and exploiting flaws across web apps, cryptography, networks, and embedded/physical systems. As Research Director at IBM X-Force Red he directs application security delivery and original research, building on prior senior roles at NCC Group and SpiderLabs. He’s published unusual work—OS fingerprinting approaches, polyglot file-format techniques, and cryptanalysis tools—and has disclosed vulnerabilities in major platforms including Google’s CAPTCHA, PHP, Windows, nginx and various AV products. Creator of the Magical Code Injection Rainbow testbeds and cryptanalysis tooling (Cryptanalib and FeatherDuster), he pairs practical research with maintainable tooling (e.g., modernizing MCIR’s PHP DB stack). A prolific speaker and media source, he blends offensive creativity with mentorship and operational security program delivery. Off-duty he holds the playful title of Baron of Sealand, a hint at his appetite for unconventional exploration.

10 years of coding experience

8 years of employment as a software developer

n/a, Exploitation, Vulnerabilities, Forensics, Reverse engineering, Cryptography, Physical security, n/a, Exploitation, Vulnerabilities, Forensics, Reverse engineering, Cryptography, Physical security at Infosec Self-Study

n/a, Audio Production, n/a, Audio Production at Art Institute of New England

Baccalaureate, Computer Network and Information Systems, Baccalaureate, Computer Network and Information Systems at Wentworth Institute of Technology

Computer Crime Investigation, Incident Handling, Computer Crime Investigation, Incident Handling at SANS Cyber-Defense Initiative 2009

Github Skills (4)

mysql10

php10

mysqli10

database-administration9

Programming languages (6)

C++CSSShellCPHPPython

Github contributions (5)

SpiderLabs/MCIR

Nov 2015 - May 2016

The Magical Code Injection Rainbow! MCIR is a framework for building configurable vulnerability testbeds. MCIR is also a collection of configurable vulnerability testbeds.

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:8 commits, 1 PR, 12 pushes in 6 months

Contributions summary:Daniel primarily focused on updating database connections within the PHP code, specifically transitioning from the deprecated `mysql` extension to `mysqli`. This involved modifying database configuration files and updating code within multiple challenge directories, improving compatibility. In addition, they also addressed the package dependency of PHP, updating to php5-mysqlnd in autoinstall.sh. These changes indicate a focus on maintaining and improving the codebase's compatibility and functionality.

configurableinjectionsecuritycode-injectionrainbow

unicornsasfuel/cryptanalib3

Sep 2020 - Mar 2021

A Python3-compatible fork of the Cryptanalib module from FeatherDuster.

Contributions:1 release, 11 commits, 3 PRs in 5 months

cryptographycryptanalysispythonpython3

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