Daniele Muscetta
My journey with computers and software started when I began programming on a Commodore 64 at the age of ten. Most people bought the Commodore 64 to play games and - of course - I did play some of them too, but my main interest about it was the creative possibility of being able to make my own programs, games, music.
Fast forward a few years and after a few computers, all that time spent on those proved to have been useful, as I started working in IT eventually.
I have been working for a Microsoft partner and system integrator for nearly 5 years, starting in 1997 till 2001.
In that first IT job I first got in contact with Operations Manager among other things - like migrating the first italian company to Windows 2000 together with people in Microsoft Consulting Services.
After that, I worked as technical support analyst at Symantec, and then as the Security Officer of a financial company in the Netherlands (DSB Groep N.V.).
During that period I have been regularly publishing articles on Italian IT websites (most of which are no longer running), on my personal weblog http://www.muscetta.com and writing on various security-related mailing lists. During this period I got more knowledge in the security field as a whole, on a lot of different technologies and platforms, not just Microsoft technology anymore. He is a great fan and supporter of the HoneyNet Project, and he partecipated to a couple of their "Scan of the Month" chanllenges: one regarding forensic analysis of a compromised linux system (http://www.honeynet.org/scans/scan29/sol/dmuscetta/index.html) and one related to firewall log analysis http://www.honeynet.org/scans/scan30/sub/1/index.html).
Most of what I did in the security space was really analysing logs and running queries against databases. be it intrusion detection or system management most of the techniques for data mining are really the same.
In 2004 I joined Microsoft (and moved back to my sunny Italy from nice-but-cold Holland). At Microsoft I got many different titles: originally it was "Technical Account Systems Engineer" for Premier Support. Kind of what now is called "Dedicated Support Engineer", which is a part of "Premier Field Engineer" and it tends to be more focused on one vertical technology than it used to be back in 2004/2005, but the bottom line is still helping enterprise customers. Some more recent explanation of what I do for work under the current title is in this post on my personal blog.
This blog is really not updated anymore, as I prefer to rant on my own domain, in my own time.
