Sergey Ulasen

Ulasen worked at VirusBlokAda, a small antivirus vendor in Minsk, when a customer in Iran reported computers crashing and restarting. What he and colleague Oleg Kupreev pulled out was not ordinary malware: it spread on USB sticks through an unknown flaw in how Windows rendered shortcut files, and its drivers were signed with certificates stolen from Realtek. The company named it Rootkit.Tmphider and alerted Microsoft.

The warning circulated on security forums, Microsoft gave it the name Stuxnet, and only months later did it become clear this was a state weapon aimed at Iran's uranium enrichment. That the most written-about cyberweapon in history was spotted during a support ticket at an obscure vendor remains one of the industry's favourite stories. Ulasen later moved to Kaspersky Lab.