Herman Stevens
About Herman Stevens
My résumé will tell you about my professional life.
I am currently owner of Astyran and work for national and international companies and governments to deliver pragmatic security consultancy, reviews, audits and information security awareness training.
See below, if you want to know a little bit more of my background.
History
The internet footprint of Herman Stevens
My résumé is only a partial view on my professional life. More - but still fragmented insights - can be discovered by looking at my internet footprint below.
It took me quite some time re-discovering my own past. It was an interesting experience looking in the deeper dungeons of the Internet since my love for communication, technology and security started way before the birth of the commercial internet.
Yes, I'm that old.
During this journey I connected again with old friends and rediscovered my own past. Maybe not all of it was rosy, but whatever I met on my way, it made me to what I am today. And I'm quite happy and content with that.
Once upon a time
Long long ago, before the commercial Internet
As a young boy, I was fascinated with repairing old radios and TVs and listening at night to stations from all over the world on the short wave bands.
At the age of 18 my parents bought me an advanced programmable calculator, the Texas Instruments TI 58c. I soon became member of the Belgian owners club and started programming. Yes, this was by manually inputting OP codes into the calculator.
Fast forward a few years (1984) and I got my first real computer, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. I soon started programming in Basic.
A bit later I acquired the Amiga 500 and got bitten by the first disk viruses. Soon I was experimenting with AREXX scripts and programming in Modula 2 with the M2Amiga compiler, Forth and Lattice C. All this by using the Micro-Emacs editor.
Software was bought on the so-called Fish Disks and through reading the documents on those disks, I learned about a network of Amiga enthusiasts.
I wanted to be part of that network and bought my first modem (a 1200 baud one), connected it to the phone-line and started dialing bulletin board systems (BBS).
Dawn of a new era
Some historic data aobut my internet presence.
Question from me on 24/04/1990 related to Bitwise XOR in comp.lang.modula2
Message from me related to UUCP at here
Hundreds of messages from my Fido points from March 1993 to September 1994 as augfl.be
The Nightbreed BBS Ascii logo
On Linux.
I must have had a keen interest in security for a very long time, since I was one of the voters in May 1996 to create the Usenet newsgroups related to Pretty Good Privacy(PGP).
Career
After a career of over ten years covering security related issues in diverse platforms and environments, I currently focus on application security where aligning business expectations of security with technical possibilities and constraints in a mostly outsourced environment is of great importance.
The bulk of my security experience is comprised of Information Security Governance related work (risk assessments, ISO 17799/27001 policies, best practices using ITIL, COBIT ...), technical vulnerability assessments such as penetration tests and code reviews on the application level, delivering security related training and Payment Card Industry (PCI) audits.
I like to experience other cultures and insights and I am eager to assess and explore different information security related issues and pragmatic solutions across the world. I successfully delivered and lead projects in Belgium and abroad (in most parts of Europe, the Middle East, the Far East and the United States).