#4 Joanna Rutkowska

Joanna Rutkowska is a Polish computer security researcher and an ethical hacker. She is primarily known for her research on low-level security and stealth malware. She became known after the Black Hat Briefings conference in Las Vegas in August 2006, where Rutkowska presented an attack against Vista kernel protection mechanism, and also a technique dubbed Blue Pill, that used hardware virtualization to move a running OS into a virtual machine. Subsequently she has been named one of Five Hackers who put a Mark on 2006 by eWeek Magazine for her research on the topic.

Rutkowska also gave an open advice to Vice President of Microsoft's Security Technology Unit to further tighten security on Windows Vista system. She is an elite hacker who an entrepruener who launced her own security services startup Invisible Things Lab in Warsaw, Poland.

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