Christopher Kruegel

At TU Wien, Kruegel helped build Anubis, one of the first public services where anyone could upload a suspicious file and get back a report on what it did inside a sandbox. The idea — run it and watch, rather than read the code — is now standard practice at every antivirus vendor.

At UC Santa Barbara, together with Giovanni Vigna, he led the much-discussed 2009 experiment in which the group hijacked command and control of the Torpig botnet for ten days. The resulting paper, Your Botnet Is My Botnet, offered a rare inside view: around 180,000 infected machines and tens of gigabytes of stolen credentials. In 2011 the two founded Lastline.