Kotler is an
autodidact and played with computers and programmed since an early age. He started his career with the
Israel Defense Forces.[5][11] After serving in the military, Kotler worked at Radware where he became the
Security Operation Center Team Leader.[12] In 2009, Kotler (along with colleague, Tomer Bitton) demonstrated at DEF CON how a hacker could feasibly spread
malware through software updates for applications like
Skype. At the conference, Kotler and Bitton released a tool known as Ippon ("game over" in
judo parlance) that could ask users on a public
Wi-Fi network to update a specific application. If the users agreed, they would download malware instead of the updated version of the application.[7][8]
Kotler left Radware in 2010 and joined a digital security firm, Security Art. Kotler served as the company's CTO. In May 2011, Kotler presented at the HackInTheBox conference in
Amsterdam where he demonstrated how a
Stuxnet-like malware could physically destroy servers in a
permanent denial-of-service (PDoS) attack.[13] Later in 2011, Kotler and
Iftach Ian Amit presented at DEF CON, demonstrating how a bot master could communicate with
botnets and with "zombie machines" using
VoIP conference calls. Their open-source software, Moshi, illustrated how they could send instructions to and receive data from botnets and infiltrated networks using any phone line (including payphones).[9][14] Kotler also hosted a "Hack-a-thon" in 2011 with the goal of teaching hackers new techniques and improving information security.[4][15]
After leaving Security Art, Kotler went on to co-found SafeBreach with Guy Bejerano in September 2014.[16] Kotler serves as the company's CTO.[5] In July 2015, SafeBreach announced that it had raised $4 million in funding from
Silicon Valley-based
Sequoia Capital and
angel investor,
Shlomo Kramer.[1][6] One of the company's primary services is a simulated "war game" that seeks to find breaches in a network's system.[6]
Kotler is the author of "Reverse Engineering with LD_PRELOAD," an article published in 2005.[17] The article discussed how
LD_PRELOAD can be abused in order to highjack functions and inject code and manipulate applications flow.[18] The same year, Kotler wrote for and presented at the 22nd
Chaos Communication Congress.[19] His presentation "Advanced Buffer Overflow Methods" was used in various academic papers and conferences.[20][21][22] Additional work includes speaking at BlackHat USA and RSA Europe in 2008 on the topic of a prototype Javascript malware called Jinx,[23][24] and organizing two additional hackathons proving the concept of Trojan in Python that infects Python files.[25]
^Ligh, Michael Hale (2014). The Art of Memory Forensics: Detecting Malware and Threats in Windows, Linux, and Mac Memory. John Wiley & Sons.
ISBN9781118824993.