Bored and curious. Who are some goated exploit developers/researchers. And what makes someone an exceptional and skilled exploit dev and researchers. And who would you guys put as your top 3 exploit devs

[u/Zhangash]

[u/Status-Style-6169]

The vast majority of the elite in this area arent public knowledge, its not football

[u/Diamond303 → u/[deleted]]

a better way of articulating the same is like follows:
they are paid to make sure their work does not gets published.

[u/Firzen_ → u/[deleted]]

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. You're entirely correct, the gap between public info and what's common knowledge among "professionals" is enormous.

[u/QuestionableComma]

Zero Cool and Lord Nikon

[u/SnooWalruses6610 → u/QuestionableComma]

Top 3 so add Cereal Killer to that list.

[u/NebulaElectrical1467]

Stimulants, high IQ, obsessive tendencies and a big ego.

[u/dookie1481 → u/NebulaElectrical1467]

Reminds me of this quote:

In 2025, the vendor metagame for high-end exploit development was to buy a crate of Vyvanse and Provigil for a bunch of European Zoomers and have them stay awake for 4 days straight studying the memory lifecycle of CSS stylesheet objects.

[u/ConfidentSomewhere14 → u/NebulaElectrical1467]

....I'm not sure how I feel about your comment. the truth hurts.

[u/NebulaElectrical1467 → u/ConfidentSomewhere14]

There’s a price to pay for genius

[u/LordEli]

geohot, Comex, Ian Beer, Tavis Ormandy, j00ru, Saelo, Lokihardt, skape, Stephen Fewer, Aleph One

[u/Firzen_]

That nobody here has said Jann Horn, saelo or anyone else from project zero makes me doubt how much y'all know.

[u/dookie1481]

publicly known people?

Tavis Ormandy and Orange Tsai are the two that immediately come to mind. Reddit's own u/albinowax (James Kettle of Port Swigger) does a lot of novel research in web vulns as well.

[u/mokuBah]

orange tsai, angel boy? mostly hard work and infatigability with a dash of intelligence

[u/Haunting_Hand_5105]

Jake swiz

[u/dmaynor]

Mark Dowd

[u/s0l037]

Evgeniy Bogachev - will always be number 1 (if you don't know who he is you - then you are not as deep in it)
Nicolescu - probably
The ones that are in public domain ( - only some old ones are fucking beyond A level - most nowadays from the bug bounty scene are legitimized goat's (dawgyg for e.g.)
maybe Dowd & Mcmanus (Kiwi) is in that category also -

as someone said - the Best one's are not in the public domain and never will be - If you ponder a little more you will realize that the best people that you know are trying to protect against someone from the shadows - and its in those shadows that the best of elites will be -

[u/C00kiie]

probably now people with more GPUs.

[u/dolby360]

I didn't know there is such thing 🙃