Przemysław Frasunek
About me
I'm an entrepreneur and software, IT security and networking professional, with 25+ years of experience in the industry. I have co-founded and sold two companies. I currently serve as a board member of Redge Technologies. You can read the full story below.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was involved in a security research. Since 2017 I'm a cybersecurity expert in Business Centre Club, Poland.
In 2025, I started teaching a cybersecurity course for postgraduate students at SWPS University.
I live in Warsaw, together with my wife and three daughters. I'm a member of Porsche Club Poland and a licensed amateur radio operator (SQ5JIV).
And by the way - I'm the owner of Tęczowa Sowa, a cool place for kids in Warsaw.
You can reach me by sending an email to the address [firstname]@[surname].com
My story
I was born in 1983 in Lublin, Poland. In 1987 I had the opportunity to play with the first computer, the Atari 800 XL, which influenced my future life. In 1995 I started my journey with networking. I set up a BBS and joined Fidonet (as 2:484/45, then 2:480/124). In 1996 my interest shifted to FreeBSD and TCP/IP networking. Together with my colleagues I've started one of the first amateur LANs connected to the Internet. In 1998 I started attending the Unia Lubelska High School, where I took over the administration of the school's servers and network. In the same year, I started a public shell server (lagoon.freebsd.lublin.pl), which is still running (and hosting this website). It provided free shell accounts for ~300 people. Around 2000, I developed rexec, a kernel module allowing to restrict the execution of binaries by unprivileged users and imposing additional checks on the setuid/setgid binaries, which later evaluated into the Cerber project.
I have been involved in security research since 1999 and have found more than 40 vulnerabilities in widely used software (see below). One of my major achievements was exploiting a then little known class of vulnerabilities, uncontrolled format strings. I developed an exploit for wu-ftpd 2.6.0 (CVE-2000-0573), which at that time was one of the most widely used FTP server software. The exploit was providing a pre-auth remote code execution (RCE). Another was the discovery of a buffer overflow vulnerability in ntpd (CVE-2001-0414), a time synchronization daemon run by default on most servers on the Internet. The CVSS rating of abovementioned vulnerabilities was 10.0, making them among the most severe threats ever. This part of the story was featured in the Rozmowa Kontrolowana podcast, episode 100 (in Polish).
In 2002, I moved to Warsaw and started my part-time job as a UNIX/network consultant at ATM S.A., while studying at the same time at The Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology. I was involved in the design and operation of the metropolitan area network in Warsaw called Atman. The company eventually became the largest data center operator in Poland.
In 2003, I've got my amateur radio license with the callsign SQ8JIV, eventually changed to SQ5JIV.
As mentioned above, at the end of the 1990s I founded an amateur network together with my colleagues. In the 2000s it was transformed into a real ISP, operating under the name of Nette sp. z o.o. At that time, our strategy was to acquire other small, amateur LANs, which were usually crippled by malware spreading across the internal network. Unlike them, we enforced the PPPoE protocol, which allowed us to impose filtering of intra-LAN traffic limiting the spread of malware. I used FreeBSD with mpd5 to do this. I even implemented a dynamic IPv6 RA daemon to support IPv6 in this environment. Typically, we were able to get the network back up and running within a few days after the acqusition, making users happy. In 2020, the company was acquired by Vectra, the largest Polish CATV provider. Prior to the acquisition, the company's FTTH network provided Internet access to more than 3,000 B2B and B2C customers.
Since 2007, while still working at ATM S.A., I've been involved in building the first video-centric content delivery network in Poland, which eventually evaluated into fully-featured white-label OTT platform (now Redge Media). In 2015, I was the originator of the redGuardian (now Redge Guardian) service, designed to mitigate DDoS attacks in a software-defined manner. In 2020 I've managed to spin out and acquire the company (with outside funding from Custodia Capital) and rebrand it as Redge Technologies. In the two years following the buyout, Redge's revenue grew by over 100%.
In 2022, 95% of the company was acquired by Play, the largest mobile network operator in Poland, which in turn is owned by France's Iliad Group. The transaction was widely recognized (1, 2) in the media mainstream.
As of 2025, Redge has customers in more than 20 countries worldwide and owns two subsidiaries: mediaTool and Vestigit. As a board member, I am involved in the company's strategy and its day-to-day management.