Meet the Swiggers

Gareth H

Gareth H

Researcher

Quotes

When I left school I started a cyber cafe business with my dad - and learned all about HTML - the cafe was called Blackburn Cyber Space. Unfortunately, the cafe wasn't as popular as we thought it would be, so I moved onto designing websites. I worked as a website designer for a couple of years, using Photoshop to unleash my creativity.

At the same time I was learning to program in Perl and JavaScript, and eventually became a web developer - mainly programming in PHP. I then developed a keen interest in web security after finding vulnerabilities in both mine and my colleagues code. I started blogging on thespanner.co.uk and that's where web security really took off for me - I was having great fun finding browser security holes.

Do you have any cool or interesting side projects?

I maintain a cool side project called Hackvertor. It's a tag based conversion tool BApp for Burp Suite. In my spare time I'm often developing new features or tags. I really enjoy working on it and spend way too much time on it.

What do you think makes PortSwigger different?

People. We hire the best people that are a pleasure to work with. There are no egos, and everybody is willing to listen and speak their mind.

When did you first hear about PortSwigger, or Burp Suite?

I used Burp Suite very early on before it was as popular as it is today. Many years ago there weren't any decent tools to proxy web traffic. I think I first learned about it from a friend on sla.ckers (a web security forum).

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