Congratulations to the 2020 award winner and runner ups!
Recognizing writers who know their sh1t when it comes to online security.
And the winner was...
340 votes
Runner-Ups
289 votes
As someone who's been coding since the age of 11, Ax transitioned into cybersecurity shortly after graduating with a software engineering degree and has loved the decision ever since! From building things and engineering solutions, he went full on into breaking things and securing them, and exploring what's behind the scenes. This has tremendously helped him as a professional expose himself to different technologies and languages, and learn along the way. Bio: Endorsed an Exceptional Talent, a recognised leader in digital technology by the British Government and frequently featured on leading media outlets like Fortune, The Register and CIO, Ax is a Security Researcher and Engineer who holds passion for perpetual learning. In his spare time, he loves exploiting vulnerabilities, ethically and educating a wide range of audiences. He’s an active community member of the OWASP Foundation and the British Association of Journalists (BAJ). Ax’s expertise lies in vulnerability research, software development and web app security. Through responsible disclosure, he has previously exposed serious bugs and security vulnerabilities affecting national & global organisations like HM Government, Yodel, U.S. DHS, P.F. Chang’s, Planet Fitness, Comcast/Arris, Ellucian and the popular restaurant chain, Buca di Beppo. In early 2018, Ax helped prevent a massive data breach at Georgia Tech by going public with a serious flaw which was left unpatched for over a year. He hence earned himself a place on Tech’s Vulnerability Reporters “hall of fame” page.
171 votes
Vasiliy Ivanov is the founder and CEO of KeepSolid, a company that builds modern security and productivity solutions for corporate and personal use. The most popular products KeepSolid developed for more than 21M customers worldwide include VPN Unlimited, KeepSolid SmartDNS, KeepSolid Goals, and others. An industry veteran with over 15 years of experience, Vasiliy holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science and has a solid background in software development and project management. He is a contributor to the major business and tech websites, including HackerNoon, Forbes, DZone, and ITProPortal.
Sharmini is a blockchain advocate and emerging technology geek. She ran a marketing agency focused on FinTech before getting the blockchain bug, and turning to work in the cryptocurrency industry. She’s played with a few dApps in the Ethereum ecosystem. These days she’s building the world’s first decentralised VPN on blockchain - Mysterium Network, as a core part of its leadership team. To date, Sharmini has led marketing strategy for financial technology and blockchain companies across 8 different markets. She has been nomadic for the last two years and has built strong and interesting opinions; both on how the global financial, identity and information systems are broken, and the steps we can take to fix them.
Vasily is a computer science/blockchain researcher with an academic background in materials science (it is an emerging discipline on the intersection of chemistry, physics, and mathematics). He has made a lot of stuff devoted to novel high-capacity Li-ion batteries in the past (published 4 academic articles and one patent). Since 2013 he has been a crypto enthusiast and since 2017 has been working full-time in the blockchain industry as a researcher and token engineer. He postponed my Ph.D. defense for this reason (it will be finally defended on 25 Sep 2020, and is devoted to the modeling of intercalation processes in inorganic 3D structures). Over the last three years he has actively worked in the blockchain space in employee and advisor positions, including a year in Akropolis.io (Defi project). He has also contributed to several media publications, including hackernoon.com and being approached for expert comments for cointelegraph.com.he hasI achieved good results in token engineering - he found a serious vulnerability in the design of bZx Protocol and won a second-place on the first token engineering hackathon ever (Diffusion 2019, Berlin, hosted by Outlier Ventures). Since late 2019 he has been working as a Head of Research in Cellframe, a blockchain network aimed at providing infrastructure for the future of the Internet. It is developed in plain C with Assembler optimizations and is very resource-efficient. The "killer feature" is that Cellframe's contracts (they call them "blockchain services") can directly operate with computer memory, CPU, HDD, Internet channel, and other resources. It provides an ability to launch decentralized web services such as VPN, CDN, Cloud storage, video streaming, and many more without crutches (for example, in blockchains like Ethereum you cannot do it in the same way). Also, this protocol is secured by post-quantum encryption and some other modern tools. Our project is in testnet phase and we launched Kelvpn.com - an open-source decentralized VPN. Now, kelvpn.com is used by 3,000 users worldwide. Besides his work in Cellframe, he is an active contributor to the token engineering community being a member of the Review Group. This group is established to provide assessment standards and review economic models of blockchain projects and dApps. He also has a small website - technomads.wtf, which is devoted to web3 and lifestyle of digital nomads.
Rohit is a micro-electronics design engineer, working in the semiconductor industry (Texas Instruments). Designing RF and analog circuits are part of his day job. At night, he let his curiosity about blockchain and crypto-currencies get the better of him! He has been following the blockchain space since the 4th quarter of 2017. His enthusiasm for writing and his interest for blockchain has provided him with a new (and more meaningful) pastime to indulge in.
Joseph is a professional digital marketer. He is the founder of Digitage.net, a digital marketing agency. He is highly enthusiastic about all things business and technology, and he share’s informative resources to help businesses and consumers stay informed, safer, and smarter online.
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