Katie Moussouris

Who She Was 

Katie Moussouris taught herself to program at age eight on a Commodore 64 computer her mother bought her. She studied molecular biology and mathematics at Simmons College in Boston while working as a lab assistant on the Human Genome Project at MIT's Whitehead Institute, and she later worked as a systems administrator at MIT before joining the security firm @stake as a penetration tester in 2002. She went on to found Symantec Vulnerability Research and then, at Microsoft, created the company's first bug bounty program, which pays outside hackers to report security flaws instead of exploiting them. In 2016, she helped launch Hack the Pentagon, the first bug bounty program run by the U.S. federal government, and founded her own company, Luta Security, to help organizations and governments work with hackers. She is a co-author and co-editor of the international standards for how vulnerabilities are disclosed and handled, and she has testified before both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives.

Why She Matters

Katie Moussouris helped change how the world treats hackers. For years, a person who found a security flaw in a major product often had no clear, safe way to report it. She helped build the systems, first at Microsoft and then for the Pentagon, that made finding and reporting vulnerabilities paid, legitimate, respected work. For young people, she is proof that a penetration tester's skills can shape not just one company's security but the rules of an entire industry, and that a career in this field can begin with a curious kid and a home computer.