SATAN (the 1995 scanner panic)
loresecurityops culture
The free network vulnerability scanner released in April 1995 by Dan Farmer and Wietse Venema - and the first time the industry had a full public argument about whether giving defenders an attacker's tool is responsible.
The press predicted catastrophe on release day; the catastrophe did not arrive, and administrators finally saw their own networks the way an intruder did. Farmer was reportedly let go by his employer for publishing it, and the authors shipped a renaming script so squeamish sites could call it SANTA. Every argument about Metasploit, Nmap and offensive tooling since is a rerun of the SATAN debate, and the accompanying paper - Improving the Security of Your Site by Breaking Into It - is the founding text of penetration testing as a discipline.
Also known as: security administrator tool for analyzing networks, dan farmer, wietse venema, santa