The Other Culprit: On Jamie Moles and Forty Years of Getting Each Other Into Trouble

Every so often the universe, in its usual understated way, produces two people who meet as teenagers, discover a shared and slightly unhealthy enthusiasm for making beige boxes do things they were never designed to do, and then spend the next four decades blaming each other for the resulting career. This is the story of one such pair. I am one half of it. The other half is a man named Jamie Moles, and he has just launched a website, which gives me the perfect excuse to talk about him at length while he isn't in the room to object.

Jamie and I have known each other for over forty years now, which is a genuinely alarming amount of time to have known anyone, let alone someone who still occasionally texts me at 2am with a theory about TCP resets. We each credit the other, depending on which of us is telling the story and how much wine has been involved, with the original spark of interest in computing. The honest version is probably that we co-radicalised each other: two kids with access to a keyboard and no adult supervision worth mentioning, egging one another on until "interest" became "obsession" became, eventually, "entire career." Neither of us has fully recovered, nor, I suspect, wants to.

Where our paths diverged is instructive. I went the route of the generalist: CIO, CTO, advisor, the sort of person who ends up explaining technology strategy to a boardroom while privately still finding a working modem noise more emotionally satisfying than most modern UX. Jamie went deep. Properly, seriously, thirty-five-years-and-counting deep, into the specific and unglamorous business of catching people who are trying to break into networks that do not belong to them.

 

From MS-DOS Antivirus to AI-Driven Threat Detection

Here is the detail that I think properly captures the man: in the late 1980s, when most of the world's understanding of a computer virus began and ended with a vague sense of unease about floppy disks, Jamie sat down and wrote an antivirus toolkit for MS-DOS. Not because anyone asked him to. Because the problem existed and it offended him that it was unsolved.

He has been doing versions of that ever since. These days he is Head of Technical Marketing at ExtraHop, a leader in network detection and response, which is the sort of job title that sounds abstract until you realise it means he spends his working life turning "here is what an attacker actually does inside a network" into language that the rest of us can understand and, more importantly, act on. Virus era to AI era, in one uninterrupted career, is not a small thing to have on a CV. It is the technological equivalent of having watched the sea evolve into someone who can also do your tax return.

Along the way he has become one of the trusted voices the press calls when something has gone wrong at internet scale, which is how you end up quoted in Sky News, The Telegraph, GQ, The Register, Dark Reading, Computer Weekly, TechRadar Pro, Infosecurity Magazine and SC Media, variously explaining to a frightened public why their washing machine did not, in fact, join a botnet through any fault of their own. This is a genuinely useful public service. Somebody has to be calm and specific while everyone else is reaching for the word "hack" as a verb, adjective, and general expression of panic.

 

Why You Should Go and Read His Blog

Jamie has just put all of this, plus his own writing, up at ja.miemol.es, and the blog section in particular is worth your time in a way that has nothing to do with the fact that I am contractually obliged, by forty years of friendship, to say so.

The post I would point you at first is Poker, Game Theory, and the Fundamental Theorem of Network Security, which takes David Sklansky's Fundamental Theorem of Poker, a piece of gambling theory about the value of information asymmetry, and uses it to explain why defending a network is nothing whatsoever like a game of chess and everything like a game of poker. Chess assumes both players can see the whole board. Networks do not work like that, and neither does poker, and the essay makes that connection with the kind of clarity that only comes from someone who has spent decades doing both the technical work and the explaining-it-to-humans work, and refuses to let either skill atrophy.

The wider blog covers detection, attacker behaviour, and, per its own description, "the odd hand of poker," which is exactly the sort of range I would expect. There is also a running feed of his work over on the ExtraHop blog, covering everything from Five Eyes AI threat advisories to a teardown of a Python-based backdoor that abuses legitimate Windows tools for persistence, which is precisely the kind of anatomy-of-an-attack detail that separates people who talk about security from people who have actually chased the thing down a packet capture at 1am.

 

 

It is a strange privilege, watching someone you have known since before either of you could legally drive turn into one of the people the industry actually listens to. I would like to take some credit for it. I will settle for having been in the room, forty-odd years ago, when the fuse was first lit, and for being able to say, with total confidence, that Jamie was always going to end up here. Some people are destined for greatness. Others are merely destined to have known them first and to never, ever let them forget the MS-DOS days.

Go read his blog. Tell him I sent you. He will pretend to be annoyed about it, which is how you will know it landed.

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