Kostya Kortchinsky
French exploit developer who showed in 2009 that a virtual machine could climb out of its VMware cage.
Kortchinsky worked at Immunity, Dave Aitel's company, writing exploits for its Canvas framework. At Black Hat USA 2009 he presented Cloudburst: a chain of bugs in the emulated SVGA graphics device in VMware that let code in a guest execute on the host. It was one of the first public, working VM escapes, and it landed just as cloud providers were starting to sell shared hypervisors as a security boundary.
He later worked on security at Google. Cloudburst became the template for a whole line of research: virtual hardware is a large pile of old C code parsing guest-controlled input, which is exactly where bugs like to live.