My Life As a Spyware Developer

Architecture and Background

Garry Pejski - My Life as a Spyware Developer Behold! Billions of computers are infected with spyware every decade! But how! And why!

Vulnerability Analysis

Let's join our host as he takes you behind the curtain of the mysterious spyware industry. This will be a high level discussion with no technical knowledge needed. I'll be covering how I ended up writing spyware, what the software was capable of, how it was deployed onto millions of machines, how all the money was made (not how you'd expect) and how it all fell apart (of course). After seeing this talk, all your dreams will come true and you will never die!

Exploitation and Demonstrations

Garry Pejski has had a varied programming career that has included creating dating websites, pharmacy software, online casinos and custom applications for power plants. Also, he wrote spyware when he was broke and couldn't find a real job (he's very sorry). He's been programming professionally for like 13 years now. Damn.

Remediation and Defensive Strategies

These days he's basically a technical manager at an engineering consulting company. He still writes software, but has been up to a lot of NERC CIP security work lately. He is handsome and lives in Toronto. For copies of the slides and additional materials please see the DEF CON 18 Archive here: