Philip Young, aka Soldier of Fortran, is a mainframe phreak! His love of mainframes goes back to when he watched Tron, wide eyed, for the first time. Though it would be decades until he actually got his hands on one he was always interested in their strangeness. Phil has always been in to security since his days as a sysop and playing around on Datapac (the Telenet of Canada). During a recent review of security on a mainframe he decided to dig a little deeper than previously and discovered two things: (1) No one in the mainframe community knows about what’s going on in the security community (2) No one in the security community knows anything about mainframes (other than that one time they got access to one and didn’t know what to do). Ever since, he’s been obsessed with raising awareness of these machines and how to accurately assess their security. In the past Phil has worked as a Sr. IT Security Analyst for top consulting firms, a tier 3 engineer and wrote for hacking zines in Toronto. He has presented at security conferences, talking about mainframes, in Washington DC (Shmoocon), Las Vegas (BSides), Chicago (Thotcon), San Francisco (BAHA) and Austin (BSides). His hobbies include haxoring JCL, REXX scriptin’ and ANSI/EBCDIC/ASCII art.
