About Us

Some of the Story.......
Consulting practices through Packetninjas LLC started in 2005, however the primary founder of Packetninjas had been performing penetration testing for corporate and government entities in the fall of 2000. After years of existing within the corporate world the founder Daniel Clemens found himself offering more and more of his free time to consulting projects. It was during this time he decided to formally start Packetninjas LLC to accommodate the demand of new clients.

The initial story behind the term ‘Packet’ + ‘Ninjas’ came as a playful discussion between co-workers in 2002. A co-worker, would make jokes about how Daniel Clemens would solve all of the technical problems through packet analysis, thus being proclaimed by others as the ‘packetninja’.  This prompted a small research group based out of Alabama to take name shortly after the Birmingham Infragard chapter had been formed in 2001. Members of the Packetninjas research group based their research on emerging threats and practical analysis of malware and exploits.

Quiet notoriety had started during this time, after members had discovered specific denial of service capabilities within the CodeRed worm targeting whitehouse.gov as well as mapping capabilities of Chinese based hackers. Members of Packetninjas provided key information which helped mitigate threats, yet also won small time local recognition amongst information security practitioners and law enforcement groups.

Shortly after this time period a mailing list was formed hoping to gather pragmatic researchers and influential leaders in the information security space as well as law enforcement members with the hopes to facilitate open discussion of the current vulnerabilities and threats which affect computers and networking equipment.

As popularity grew to 300+ members, corporate awareness of the need for information security consulting grew as well, thus starting an official company, surrounding the name ‘Packetninjas’.

In 2007 the mailing list had been temporarily discontinued due to an overwhelming amount of work being dedicated to Packetninjas LLC.

What do we offer?
Packetninjas provides solutions for both large and small businesses, corporations and government entities with security disciplines that fit where the customer is in their security life cycle while complimenting existing business needs.

Mission Statement
Packetninjas L.L.C was formed after seeing that there was a need for honest and truly experienced security assessments and recommendations based on what customers really need , while also relying on conceptialization, knowledge and and true process. In short, we wanted to be set apart from all the “defaults only, huge report , scanner based” security  companies. Our main goal is to do what is right for the customer without trying to project things which may over hype a security bug or concern. In short, we want to offer practical solutions to clients avoiding fluff.

Download some of our marketing material.

• Packetninjas LLC Professional Services Overview
• Packetninjas LLC Specific Digital Forensic Case Studies

Management Profile
Daniel Clemens (CEO, Founder): Mr. Clemens has worked for various companies over the last 10 years in varying roles from Sr. Security Engineer , Intrusion Detection Analysis & Incident Response, Forensic Analysis and vulnerablity & threat advisor. He also worked at Healthsouth (one of the first companies in the U.S. to be prosecuted under Sarbanes Oxley), focusing on compliance, penetration testing, architecture review, perimeter defense, forensic investigations & incident response , malware and anti-virus strategies. Daniel previously worked in the dot-.com era with disciplines rooted in network & system administration. Mr. Clemens has also helped foster security awareness through being a founding member in the Birmingham Infragard chapter as well as a serving as vice president and president and board member for this group.

Differentiators between Packetninjas and others….
There are a lot of elements that can make up differences. Some of the differences we believe exist in our case boil down to a few things.

We belive in a Hacker Work Ethic, Method Based Approach, Strategic Planning , Diverse Technical Experiences, and consistent introspective innovation; these are all things that we rely on that in turn help large enterprises and small businesses alike.

Describing each of these elements could probably turn a conversation over coffee into a deep philosophical discussion but we would like to scratch the surface on some of these details.

The Hacker Work Ethic
The Hacker Ethic has been described and possibly misused more than it has been completely understood, but for us the Hacker Ethic means the following.

Asking why questions more than how, finding the root cause of a problem, implementing goals and plans strategically versus knee jerk reactions, and finally having fun and approaching each opportunity with curiosity and wonder, while being determined to do our job with excellence.

Method Based Approach
Whether the process is forensics, a remote penetration test, web application assessment, threat modeling or even reverse enginering and malware analysis all of our processes are based on a method based approach not solely on an automated tool.(Automated tools help us in our process, but they aren’t the end all be all) This helps provide flexibility for security analysis as well as a repeatable scalable process that is thorough and not based on the single perspective of one person’s automated tool.