Marc Maiffret
High-school dropout hacker who co-founded eEye Digital Security and gave the Code Red worm its name.
Maiffret was barely an adult when he started eEye with Firas Bushnaq in the late 1990s. The company sold the Retina vulnerability scanner but was best known for finding holes in Microsoft's IIS. In June 2001 eEye published a buffer overflow in the IIS extension handling .ida files.
A month later a worm exploiting exactly that bug infected more than 300,000 servers in a day. Maiffret and colleague Ryan Permeh took it apart overnight, fuelled by Mountain Dew Code Red, and named it accordingly. It says something about the industry that one of the decade's biggest incidents is named after a soft drink. BeyondTrust bought eEye in 2012 and made Maiffret its CTO.