Christopher Abad is an American hacker, museum curator, artist, network engineer and programmer.
He is best known for his qualitative analysis of specialization stratification in the underground economies related to computer crime.
While at UCLA, Abad discovered a method by which collisions in the hash function used in Internet Protocol datagrams may be leveraged to enable covert channel communications.
[1] His discovery was a centerpiece of covert communications methodology and was the primary citation for an Association for Computing Machinery paper on covert channel detection[2] and another on a similar technique using TCP timestamps,[3] the two most well-cited and widely republished papers on the subject.
In 2005 while working at Cloudmark, Abad spent six months examining the phishing underworld from the inside.