My name is Gareth and besides assisting various other companies with their InfoSec / DevOps posture I manage Brass Horn Communications and Ablative Hosting.

  • Brass Horn Communications is a Tor friendly ISP (AS28715) which operates the largest ‘family’ of Tor Exits in the UK.

  • Ablative Hosting is a privacy centric, censorship resistent web host. All services come with a .onion domain, dual-stack services come with free SSL and all are payable with Bitcoin or Monero.

99% of our servers and 100% of our routers are OpenBSD (we have a couple of CentOS/Fedora servers for Linux only software such as Docker). Most of our software is written in GoLang and is all held together with ksh/bash shell scripts managed by Ansible.

In the past I have been;

  • DevSecOps lead for a machine learning powered cyber security product where I built the automation frameworks to perform, measure and capture evidence of the forms of attacks that the team are trying to protect against.

  • A network security architect for a mid-size managed services provider where I helped them design and deploy an information security portfolio consisting of intrusion detection, web application firewalls, DDoS detection and threat intelligence aggregation.

  • The Head of Networks at a social media aggregation company where I designed, deployed and maintained a network that spanned 4 data centers in two countries comprising of Arista 7050 / 7048 switches, Cisco 6500s, ASRs, ASAs and OpenBSD powered 40Gbit firewalls. I also regularly worked with software such as nginx, apache, haproxy, Varnish, mySQL, Redis, Hadoop (HDFS & HBase), Zookeeper, kafka, zeroMQ and others on a variety of server hardware all managed by Chef in order to handle the workload of filtering, augmenting, delivering and storing multiple simultaneous real time data streams such as the Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr Sina & other social media firehoses to customers all over the world.

My GPG keys can be found at networksaremadeofstring.com/about/public-keys/