Nicholas grew up in the BBS era he developed an unhealthy interest in the digital underground, further fueled by books and movies like Wargames, Hackers, Sneakers, Cuckoos Egg, he quickly became one of the security problems plaguing telecom giant US West, Colorado University and other business in the Colorado Area. After the tragic loss of his father in 2004, and subsequently finding his fathers machine had been fully compromised by a piracy team, Nicholas and a handful of friends used their knowledge of hacking, cracking and general computer mischief to develop a group dedicated to tracking and reporting on botnet and malware author activities. Shadowserver was formed and most of the group found it was more fun to build honeynets than wareznets. Nicholas has moved on and no longer runs the Shadowserver team but his experience with information security research continued.