About Martin Haunschmid

The moment is always the same: When I introduce myself in a lecture, one line of my career summary causes confusion: Studies in Communication. However, it quickly turns out to be a great strength: I dare to claim to be one of the few technicians who can really bring technical topics to the point well, appealingly, and entertainingly.

Technical finesse alone only gets you so far until management has to approve – or it's about training end-users.

My philosophy is therefore: Bringing technology out of the ivory tower. Only in this way can we meet the challenges of the coming years.

The situation in IT security is... not good, rather like fighting windmills. That doesn't stop me from doing my part. To make companies safer, to give hackers fewer chances, and to make the Internet what it was actually meant to be:

Cat videos.

At the beginning of my entrepreneurial activity, a website that was in development with us was played on our test server.

4 days later, it was hacked, and we were blocked by the host.

A password found its way onto the Internet that should not be on the Internet. That was a considerable learning for me – I have adapted the processes so that our local development sites are already created with secure passwords.

But much more interesting for me was: How the hackers tried to make money from the site. For hours, without eating or drinking, I tried to trace the hack via log files. A switch flipped, and I had to know what happened. This detective work was so exciting that I shortly afterwards decided: IT security will be my life's work.

Getting Hacked