My top cyber influences and mentors in rough order: NON-REAL * David Lightman from WarGames - I actually wrote a fake NORAD I hacked on my Tandy Color computer and scared the crap out of my friends when I was like 8. * Martin Bishop from Sneakers - Leadership, adaptability, going beyond the keyboard. * Harry Caul from The Conversation - Paranoia, craftsmanship, navigating ethical dillemas. REAL-WORLD * Fravia & +ORC - I put them together because I discovered them on Friavia's site. I learned assembly / disassembly, patching, how to use the internet for intelligence, a whole mindset. HUGE impact. * Optyx - He was the masked hacker on Tech TV and wrote the first MD5sum collision tool. At one point he had over 100 OSX 0days. He would send me exploits that were either just diffs or somewhat broken to get me to learn. He taught me how to really mess with IDS's by byte encoding / manipulation in network traffic. My kid drew the cartoons for his Kernel Intrusion System (KIS) which I think was the first linux rootkit publically released. He directly taught me a ton. * HDM - Not enough words to say how much I learned from him. Actual development processes, how to write tighter smaller code, how to be humble while also being a bad ass, how to encourage people who are trying to learn and contribute, how to take no shit, all kinds of things about systems. How to give talks. One of the best out there. * Halvar - How to find bugs in software. How to think in graphs. Why math is important. The whole idea of comparing patches to find 1days. Core concepts. * Ramune - No one has heard of him but he could answer any question on any subject of computing no matter how obscure. Any OS, programming language. Just a genius. * Mark Russinovich - I've never met or talked to him, but his Windows Internal books and Sysinternals tools form a core of my whole career. * Pedram Amini & Ero Carerra - I put them together because I met them together. Malware RE, file formats, patching the Z flag to mess with anti-analysis branches. HUGE influence. Pedram gave me a customized Ollydbg which I probably used for 12 years daily. * Jon Erickson - I had to buy a second copy of his book I used to first one so much. This is where I really learned memory corruption concepts and return to libc (later ROP). Also he was a super nice guy to me. * Ed Skoudis- I read his Malware book probably 10 times. Like HD, he really modeled kindness and openess in a community that can often be elitist and mean. * Mudge - Buffer overflows, DARPA. I remember him giving an almost Terrence McKenna like talk I think at defcon which showed a very unique way of thinking about security. Impactfull guy. * Jamie Butler & Greg Hoglund - Met together. They taught me how to live in and abuse the kernel. I tried to replicate everything in their rootkits book. HBGary's Responder opened up my mind to the idea of automating and productizing the stuff I was doing manually. * Parmaster - Oldschool blackhat. Taught me about infiltrating hacking groups, how to be a gangsta (he would roll into vegas in a velour track suit and sunglasses). He was generally a good mentor. He was also in about every secret society known to man so I learned about the Masons, Rosicrucians and others from him. * Joanna Rutkowska - I didn't know her well, just met a few times, but her command of the kernel and memory was revolutionary to me. I once saw her give something like a 300 slide talk at Blackhat and it was the most deeply technical and fastest spoken talk I've ever seen. * Dino Dai Zovi - Super cool, nice, and humble dood. Wifi hacking, continuation of execution, reliability in exploits, he's an artist. He came up with a hilarious volcano eruption meme at a conference that a bunch of us copied. I regret that we never got to work together but I learned a lot from his work. * Sangfroid - I learned less technical stuff from him, but rather strategic thinking, business, culture, and how to keep what is most important in focus. * Ac1db1tch3z - How to be scary. The idea of supply chain compromise. Mad respect. * Hobbit - How to go barefoot and be a brilliant curmudgeon and why I don't hate javascript enough. Seriously though I'm not sure a day has gone by since it came out that I havent used netcat. He would walk around barefoot, with a screw driver shoved through his belt, wearing cuttoff jean shorts and a pony tail and I thought he was the coolest guy ever. * SirDystic - He could be mean at times, but I got to help a little and learn from him on SMBRelay. The idea of protocol attacks was completely foreign to me and it took me embarrassingly long to understand wtf he was doing. I also watched in IRC/#cdc as he built BackOrifice which blew my mind and got me very into malware / C2. I don't think he liked me much but I learned a lot from him. * Skape & Sp00nm - I was on a private SILC chat with those guys for years and I got them to come out and give my team a training class. Meterpreter was one of the coolest things I ever saw and I used it to hack ~100k computers. Skape was super down to earth. Sp00nm taught me some ASM and the concept of assembly golf. Really nice, brilliant guys. * Chris Eagle - I had never even heard of the concept of emulation when x86emu came out. Blew my mind and became a huge part of my workflow. He was also super kind and open. * Solar Designer - What can I say, dood is an alien. I'm convinced he might be the smartest / best hacker in the world, but he's so quiet about it. I used John the Ripper constantly for 20 years and there are mysteries about it I still don't know / understand. Never met him sadly. * Richard Johnson - Brilliant guy. One of those people who would quietly msg me on IRC and point me in the right direction. I learned all about fault injection from him, lcamtuf's AFL, and Dave Aitel's SPIKE. I'm very thankful for knowing Rich. * Rain Forest Puppy - I was a network hacker primarily but RFP's work opened me up to web apps. I didn't know him well, met once or twice, hung out on some chat servers. Revolutionary guy. * Johnny Cache - I once saw him singlehandedly win defcon CTF against a bunch of whole teams of people. I focused a lot on the mechanics of actual hacking into systems and he was one of the best I ever saw. Also super nice and funny guy. * Illfak Guilfanov - I never knew him, but IDA is the goat and I've used it most days since it came out. * Phrack - Of course is on the list. If you don't read it, are you even really a hacker? * The Core Impact Team, Especially Max - The concept of Pivoting and Syscall proxying had a massive impact on me. I used it in my own tools later on. I heard "Level 1 Agent Deployed" 2934723984723 times lol. I know there are more so sorry if I missed you. These are the ones that came to mind as I was writing this. Thank all of you for the teaching and impact you had on my life and career.