Nicholas Allegra ‘Comex’
Nicholas Allegra announced on Twitter that he would be starting an internship with Apple this fall. Comex has successfully exploited Apple’s iOS mobile platform to allow owners to jailbreak their devices, even going so far as to provide a patch earlier this year for a particularly nasty vulnerability.
Florian Rohrweck
Florian Rohrweck accessed code behind Google’s applications and revealed details of Google+ before it was released. Rohrweck has joined the search giant to improve security of the company’s Web-based services.
George Hotz ‘GeoHot’
George Hotz wasn’t the first person to hack Sony’s PlayStation 3 to run other operating systems and unauthorized games, but his released instructions made it easier for others to do the same. Sony sued GeoHot and settled. Now, Facebook can claim the Sony and iPhone hacker as one of its own.
Steve Kondik ‘Cyanogen’
Steve Kondik recreated Cyanogen Mod, the home-brew Android operating system users can install on their rooted Android devices.
Peter Hajas
Peter Hajas created MobileNotifier, a jailbreak app, to revamp how the iOS Push notification system works. The new iOS reflects an improved notification function, similar to what is in MobileNotifier. When hired, he posted on Twitter that he was going to California to work for a “fruit” company.
Jeff Moss ‘Dark Tangent’
Founder of Black Hat and DEFCON security conferences, Jeff Moss was named the chief security officer for the nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). “Dark Tangent” also serves on the Homeland Security Advisory Council.
Chris Putnam
Chris Putnam created an XSS-based worm on Facebook that modified infected pages to look like MySpace profiles in 2006. After he dropped out of Georgia Southern University, he relocated to the Silicon Valley where he joined Facebook. He helped develop Facebook’s video application.
Peiter Zatko ‘Mudge’
A member of The Cult of the Dead Cow (CDC) and L0pht hacker groups in the 1990s, Peiter Zatko is now a program manager for the information innovation office at the Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). “Mudge” presented a session on password cracking and holes in Microsoft software at DEFCON in 1996.
Sven Jaschan
Sven Jaschan created the virulent NetSky/Sasser malware, which was so prevalent Microsoft put up a bounty of $250,000 for information about the malware creator.
Kevin Mitnick
Corporations hire Kevin Mitnick through his company, Mitnick Security Consulting, to hack their computer systems and report vulnerabilities so they can fix them. Stephen Colbert recently had him on his show and suggested the Federal government should hire Mitnick for cyber-attacks.