Chris Goggans, who used the name Erik Bloodaxe in honor of the Viking king Eric I of Norway, is a founding member of the Legion of Doom group, and a former editor of Phrack Magazine. Loyd Blankenship, aka The Mentor, described Goggans/Bloodaxe as "the best hacker I ever met".
Goggans was raided by the US Secret Service on March 1, 1990, but was not charged.[1]
In a 1994 interview he claimed he had never engaged in malicious hacking, explaining:
“Malicious hacking pretty much stands against everything that I adhere to. You always hear people talking about this so called hacker ethic and I really do believe that. I would never wipe anything out. I would never take a system down and delete anything off of a system. Any time I was ever in a system, I'd look around the system, I'd see how the system was architectured, see how the directory structures differed from different types of other operating systems, make notes about this command being similar to that command on a different type of system, so it made it easier for me to learn that operating system.
"Sure, I was in The Legion of Doom. I have been in everybody's system. But I have never been arrested. I have never broken anything, I have never done anything really, really, criminally bad.”[1]
But in a phone call intercepted by the Australian Federal Police as part of an investigation into Australian hacker Phoenix (Nahshon Even-Chaim) Goggans was heard planning a raid in which the pair would steal source code and developmental software from Execucom, an Austin, Texas, software and technology company, and sell it to the company’s rivals.
In the call, recorded on February 22, 1990 and later presented in the County Court of Victoria[2] as evidence against Even-Chaim, Goggans and Even-Chaim canvassed how much money they could make from such a venture and how they would split fees from Execucom’s competitors. During the call Goggans provided Even-Chaim with a number of dial-up access numbers to Execom’s computers, commenting: "There are serious things I want to do at that place", and "There’s stuff that needs to happen to Execucom.".[2] While there is no evidence that Goggans and Even-Chaim acted on this discussion, Goggans' statement of his intentions calls into question the nobility of his hacking ethics.[3]
According to Michelle Slatella and Joshua Quittner in their 1995 book Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace, Goggans was in 1990 in the process of establishing his own computer security company in Texas. They claim he planned to recruit companies as clients by hacking them and showing how vulnerable their systems were to other hackers.
As of 2005[update], Goggans is an internationally-recognized expert on information security. He has performed network security assessments for some of the world's largest corporations, including all facets of critical infrastructure, with work spanning 22 countries across four continents. Chris has worked with US Federal law-enforcement agencies on some of America's most notorious computer crime cases. His work has been referenced in publications such as Time, Newsweek and Computerworld, and on networks such as CNN and CNBC.
He is a frequent lecturer on computer security and has held training seminars in nine countries for clients such as NATO, the United States Department of Defense, and Federal Law Enforcement agencies as well as numerous corporate entities. He has been asked to present at major conferences as COMDEX, CSI, ISACA, INFOWARCON, and the Black Hat Briefings. He has also co-authored numerous books including "Implementing Internet Security," "Internet Security Professional Reference," "Windows NT Security," and "The Complete Internet Business Toolkit."
During the summer of 2003, Goggans was invited to become an Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo's Center for Collaborative Research.
During the winter of 2008, Chris Goggans was in India for ClubHack [3] India's own hackers' convention.
Currently, Goggans is president of SDI, Inc., a Virginia-based corporation providing information security consulting.