Wietse Venema
loresecurityops culture
The author of Postfix and TCP Wrapper, and, with Dan Farmer, of SATAN - the scanner that made the argument for testing your own systems the way an attacker would.
The 1993 paper that announced SATAN was called improving the security of your site by breaking into it, and the reaction was the story: a newspaper compared releasing it to handing out rocket launchers at the local library. The tool shipped anyway, and the position it defended - that defenders need the attacker's view, and that withholding the tool protects nobody who is already being scanned - is now the assumption behind every vulnerability scanner sold. Postfix, written later, is the other half of the same instinct: rebuild the mail server with privilege separation because the existing one could not be made safe.
Also known as: venema, postfix, satan, tcp wrapper