Wietse Venema

While running systems at Eindhoven University of Technology around 1990, Venema wrote TCP Wrapper: a tiny program that inetd launched ahead of the real service, logging each connection and deciding by IP address whether it got through. For a decade it shipped with nearly every Unix distribution.

In 1995 he and Dan Farmer released the SATAN network scanner, prompting the press to ask whether handing out burglary tools for free was quite allowed. At IBM Research he then wrote Postfix (1998), a mail server built as a set of small, minimally privileged processes — a pointed reply to Sendmail's long rap sheet. With Farmer he also produced The Coroner's Toolkit and the book Forensic Discovery (2004).