Mike Lynn

Lynn worked at ISS X-Force and had shown that a memory corruption flaw in Cisco IOS could be exploited to run arbitrary code on the router — at a time when many considered that impossible. Just before Black Hat in July 2005, ISS pulled the talk under pressure from Cisco, and the pages carrying his slides were torn out of the printed conference binders.

Lynn resigned and gave the talk anyway. Cisco and ISS sued and obtained an injunction against further disclosure, but the damage to their cause was done: the Streisand effect turned "Ciscogate" into the security story of the year and a standard case study in the disclosure debate.