Security Researchers and Porn: the misconceptions

There are a lot of misconceptions when your job involves analyzing sites with adult content.

Here are a few examples:

“Wow! You get to look at porn at work”

“You’re surfing porn all day, lucky you!”

I will clarify these misconceptions once and for all:

- We don’t look at porn: we look for exploits or other malicious code associated with adult oriented web-sites.

- It’s not a treat: believe me, some of the stuff we are subjected to is totally disgusting and would make sensitive people vomit.

- We do other things: this is one aspect of our work as security researchers. We are involved in many other projects such as analyzing malcode, sharing samples, writing about malware…

Thankfully for us, our HoneyPots do most of the dirty work for us. They browse millions of sites every week and find out exploits.

Jerome Segura