It's documented in Underground[1] that Spafford was the target of some crackers, eager to get info on the latest security vulrabilities; information that was difficult to obtain in the 80s. They intended to break into his computer and take it.

It's a wonderful book all about the hacking scene of 80s and early 90s. It covers a young Julian Assange, but that's not why you should read it.

1. https://underground-book.net/

For whatever it's worth, anybody with any connection to any kind of vulnerability research was a target in the 1990s.

Spaf was one of my more memorable professors at Purdue. Super nice guy and king of the anecdote.

>For other areas of cybersecurity, you may need to study psychology and management theory to better understand the people involved,

Economics in particular planned obsolesce explains why the cybersecurity industry exists.

Spaf is quite active on Mastodon these days, although it's mostly unrelated to security

@spaf@mstdn.social

Surprised that he is still active, given that he has been around since the very early days of hacking.

He was also a major figure in the development of Usenet, for those who are old enough to remember when that was a Big Deal.

"Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it. " -spaf

And some other famous quotes: https://spaf.cerias.purdue.edu/quotes.html

Usenet is a large, slow-moving self-parody ## another

FYI, Spaf is on Mastodon as spaf@mstdn.social.