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Dancho Danchev–Is He Really A Victim Of Foul Play?
http://www.lockergnome.com/theoracle/2011/01/15/dancho-danchevis-he-really-a-victim-of-foul-play/
When someone writes things that you read on a recurring basis, you get to a point where that person becomes enough a part of your life that you put some thought into it when they are no longer there.
So it was with Dancho Danchev, a security blogger and reporter on ZDNet. He was someone that reported frequently on things which affected my life, as I use Windows, Linux, and a number of software products that are frequently under attack, and his reports made life a little easier in many cases.
Now the story that came out in PC Magazine (a ZDNet affiliate) that he had gone missing since August.
I must say that I had remembered him not being there, and had not read his input for some time, but I had no idea because, as with some others I read (George Ou comes immediately to mind), people sometimes move on, and write for other places and publications. Since there are so many places on the internet, it is hard to keep track, unless you do an explicit search – even then it is not always possible to find someone.
The Zero Day blog team at ZDNet are asking for help in finding one of their writers, Dancho Danchev, who has been missing since August.
Ryan Naraine writes today that Danchev – who lives in Bulgaria – submitted his last blog post for ZDNet in August. His last update to his personal blog, meanwhile, was on September 11. Since then, Naraine has been unable to contact Danchev. Phone numbers are going to voicemail, and snail mail has also been unsuccessful.
Last month, however, ZDNet received an ominous message from a local source in Bulgaria that said "Dancho’s alive but he’s in a lot of trouble." The source did not elaborate, but apparently Danchev is being kept away from computers and phones.
Meanwhile, a member of the malware research community reached out to ZDNet to deliver a message Danchev had provided to him in September. In the letter, Danchev said that he’d uncovered what appeared to be surveillance equipment in his bathroom, which he surmised were "courtesy of Bulgarian Law enforcement+intell services who’ve been building a case trying to damage my reputation, for 1.5 years due to my clear pro-Western views." He asked this malware researcher to hold on to the information and keep it safe.
Danchev included two photos of what he found.
This is the kind of stuff that I’m sure many today thought ended with the fall of the USSR in the last century, but old habits die hard.
The loss of a talented researcher and writer is always a sad thing, and if there is not a happy resolution to this it will certainly serve to show that the end of “old world hostility” has not come to the end everyone had believed.
It also puts a bit of a cyber intrigue slant on this, as if something really big was what he discovered, and enough loss of money, or reputation, was going to occur, it is not hard to imagine that one less-than-world-renowned person disappearing would not phase those in the pursuit of “ill-gotten gains”.
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