Dave Buchwald

Early Hacking Career

Operating under the handle Bill From RNOC — a reference to Armonk, the town where IBM is headquartered — Buchwald emerged as a prominent figure in the mid-1980s hacking underground, serving as a leader of the Legion of Doom. As a teenager in the late 1980s, he developed a reputation as a skilled social engineer, manipulating phone system employees across the United States into granting him access to telecommunications infrastructure. His targets included Bell and AT&T systems, specifically COSMOS, SCCS, and LMOS, which provided him with virtually unrestricted access to phone lines nationwide, including the ability to monitor conversations. He was the lead author of the PENIX suite of hacking tools, which gained wide circulation in the community. While many of his specific techniques have since become obsolete, some of his foundational social engineering concepts remain in use by security professionals today.

Transition to Film and Consulting

In 1995, Buchwald made his first foray into the film industry when he served as a technical consultant on the movie Hackers. In that role, he edited the screenplay and personally coached members of the principal cast, drawing on his firsthand experience in the hacking world to lend authenticity to the production.

Security Career

In 1997, Buchwald co-founded Crossbar Security alongside Mark Abene — widely known by his handle Phiber Optik — and Andrew Brown. The firm provided information security services to a number of large corporations. Crossbar Security became a casualty of the dot-com bubble, ceasing operations in 2002 due to a combination of reduced corporate security spending and rising costs associated with computer security advertising.

Arts Career

Following the closure of Crossbar Security, Buchwald established himself as a film editor, freelance photographer, and graphic designer based in New York City. Since 2000, he has regularly produced cover art for 2600: The Hacker Quarterly under the pseudonym Dabu Ch'wald. In August 2006, he completed his first feature film, Urchin. He subsequently produced and edited the independent film Love Simple and entered pre-production on Kuru, the second project from the production company The Enemy.

A short film he edited, Floating Sunflowers, won the Gold Remi Award for Best Comedy Short at the 47th Worldfest-Houston International Film and Video Festival in April 2014.

In August 2018, Buchwald and collaborator Michael Lee Nirenberg presented sample scenes from a documentary series titled Reverse Engineering at the DEF CON annual hacking conference in Las Vegas.

Buchwald resides in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.