Chaordic Mind

After reading Violet Blue’s list of the Top 10 Sexy Geeks I thought it only appropriate that we qualify that list and highlight some of the sexy infosec geeks.

It took ignoring large amounts of analytical data and bayesian analysis to bring you a list like this.  We leveraged many hours of questionably reputable consultants to mine the minds of infosec geeks around world.  The result is the following list of the Top 10 sexy infosec geeks of 2009.  (Feel free to disagree or add to the list via comments.)

10. Jeff Moss (Dark Tangent)

Founder of Black Hat and Defcon, Jeff has arguably brought together more information security geeks than anyone else. He was most recently appointed to the Homeland Security Advisory Council and enjoys a comfortable following in both the black/grey/white hat words. Jeff is certainly one of the more well known and certainly connected infosec geeks out there.

09. Justine Aitel

Justine is rumored to be one of the few many women in information security who writes shell code.  She is CEO of Immunity Inc, the creators of the CANVAS security testing tool.  What she carries in her pocketbook might just be the scariest device around.

08. Chris Wysopal (Weld Pond)

Former founder of the L0pht Heavy Industries and author of netcat and L0phtCrack, Chris is a veritable force when it comes to computer security and turning computer hackery into big business.  Chris is currently CTO of Veracode, a software security testing company.

07. Erin Jacobs

Erin has done more than create the controversial  secxy pillow fight at Defcon.  She started the first ever panel (that I know of) about professional image and gender issues in information security.  This brought together women from across the spectrum to raise the level of conversation and its awareness.  In addition she is a musician, motorcyclist, and daytime CSO.

06. Dino Dai Zovi

Dino is a hacker who literally wrote the book, The Mac Hackers Handbook.  In addition to that he won the very first pwn2own at CanSecWest in 2007, was named one of Violet Blue’s Top 10 Sexy Geeks in 2007, and named one of the 15 most influential people in security by eWeek in 2008.

05. Katie Moussouris

Katie knows all about the Security Development Lifecycle and has presented on it at numerous international security conferences.  In addition, she founded the Microsoft Vulnerability Research Program (MSRP) and the Symantec Vulnerability Research Program.  Katie is presently working with the ANSI standards body defining standards for the entire industry.

04. Christopher Hoff

Chris is known for his provocative statements such as Cloudifornication.  He is a sought after speaker on cloud computing and security and one of the few people in the industry who is both smart and a good entertainer. In addition to being sharp in mind he is tattooed tough while practicing Brazilian Jujitsu. He is currently Director of Cloud and Virtualization Systems at Cisco, but better known to friends as Father Cloud.

03. Stacy Thayer

Stacy is the only one in the bunch with a Ph.D.  She founded SOURCEBoston and quickly took it global with SOURCEBarcelona.  Stacy has been connected to the information security industry for some time and creating SOURCE conferences help bring together hundreds and thousands of individuals every year to collaborate and share their common interest.

02. Jacob Appelbaum

Jake can be complicated but certainly is directed towards hardware hacking, cryptography, extreme travel, languages, and photography.  He is currently executive director of the hackerspace Noisebridge in San Francisco.  He works for the Tor project but was formerly a sysadmin for Kink.com. You don’t get more sexy than that.

01. Jack Daniel

Jack is just this guy, ya know.  He looks as sexy as ZZ Top and probably hasn’t shaven his beard since before you were born, but that experience brings with it the tenacity to know true security from common theater. He seems to be everywhere at once and always willing to help people with his guidance, sarcasm, or even sock puppets.