Richard Clayton

Clayton worked at the British provider Demon Internet before doing a PhD in Ross Anderson's security group; his 2005 thesis dealt with anonymity and traceability online. The same year he showed that BT's Cleanfeed filtering system could be run in reverse, as an oracle revealing which addresses sat on its secret blocklist.

With Tyler Moore he measured how long phishing sites stayed up and showed that banks were effectively paying for slow takedowns. He runs the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre, founded in 2015, which collects data on spam, botnets and DDoS-for-hire services and shares it with other researchers — a corrective in a field where claims were long easier to find than measurements.