Name: Tom H. Ruff
Title: Vice President, Public Sector
Agency/Company: Akamai Technologies
Advocating the hack. It’s Akamai’s job to defend government systems, and it does so for all branches of the military and most Cabinet-level agencies. Ruff, however, brought a new tool to the table: the crowdsourced vulnerability-testing approach that evolved into “Hack the Pentagon.” The Defense Department’s bug bounty experiment identified scores of vulnerabilities for a fraction of what traditional penetration testing would have cost. Akamai’s experience with its own program helped shape the effort, and DOD has since awarded contracts to conduct similar initiatives across the military services.