Thorsten Holz
German security researcher who helped turn honeypots and botnet measurement into an academic discipline.
In 2007 Holz and Niels Provos wrote "Virtual Honeypots", a book on using tools like honeyd to simulate whole networks of vulnerable machines and lure attackers in. He was active in the Honeynet Project that Lance Spitzner had started.
Around 2008 his group was among those that infiltrated the Storm botnet to measure its real size, showing that the inflated figures in the press were exactly that. Holz spent many years as a professor at Ruhr University Bochum before moving to CISPA in Saarbrücken in 2020. Later work covers fuzzing, binary analysis and attacks on voice assistants.