Mike Ridpath

Mike Ridpath (1982) is an American polymath, computer security expert, social engineer and amateur chemist.
Ridpath was born in 1982 in Washington. He dropped out of Ferndale High School and was offered a job at company Vulcan Northwest as a young computer prodigy he decided to refuse the offer and work for iAsiaworks where he could work with other like minded hackers: Tom Cross and Nick Levay. In security he is most well known for his social engineering cold calls and being one of the worlds top social engineers (SE) as list in multiple books and provided technical advisory and assistance for multiple movies including The Matrix Trilogy and Hackers.
Ridpath is the founder and chairman of the Solar Life Foundation, which manages his various business and philanthropic efforts. Ridpath is also a practicing alchemist in the tradition of Nicolas Flamel and Paracelsus.
Early life
Ridpath moved around frequently in his early life, spending many years in United States, Australia, China, Russia, Europe, Tibet and Israel. Ridpath became fluent in Hebrew, Greek, Spanish, Tibetan (Dzongkha) and Arabic to study the mysteries. Early childhood studied Cryptography to break cipher manuscripts for aging occultist. <span data-ve-clipboard-key="0.7048782946746791-0"> </span>Behind the veil of all the hieratic and mystical allegories of ancient doctrines, behind the darkness and strange ordeals of all initiations, under the seal of all sacred writings, in the ruins of Nineveh or Thebes, on the crumbling stones of old temples and on the blackened visage of the Assyrian or Egyptian sphinx, in the monstrous or marvelous paintings which interpret to the faithful of India the inspired pages of the Vedas, in the cryptic emblems of our old books on alchemy, in the ceremonies practised at reception by all secret societies, there are found indications of a doctrine which is everywhere the same and everywhere carefully concealed. With technology while he was young he spent most of his time on Tymnet, Sprintnet, modifying ham radios and cellular phones such as Oki 900, and phone phreaking. In the late 80s and early 90s, he published articles in underground e-zines: Phrack (a combination of the words Phreak and Hack) began circulation among BBSes, and focused on hacking, phreaking, and other related technological subjects; PURSUiT; 9x; and b4b0 which was a textfile-based zine created to chronicle and parody the primarily EFnet-based hacker scene. Early 90s was involved in major pirate radio and TV stations as well as a frequent guest speaker on phreak radio.
He later went on to win multiple Defcon competitions (CTF, and Social Engineering). Was a member of both dead society and ACME Pharmaceuticals.
Professional career
Ridpath began his technical career in 2001 at iAsiaWorks, where he was hired on as a senior security engineer at 17. In 2010 while at IOActive he regularly gave information security presentations at hacker and security industry conferences for which he is well know for his social engineering and SSL analysis demonstrations.

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