The word hacker draws a pretty negative light, and always has.  Ever since the extremely over exaggerated 80’s computer hacking movies, they have been portrayed as nothing but criminals hiding out in their parents’ houses. Well, there are multiple types of hackers on the scene these days.

The two most popular are Black Hat Hackers, who hack maliciously and for profit, and White Hat Hackers who do it to help protect online users and companies from Black Hat Hackers. The year 2016 was a notable one for the White Hats, so here’s a look at the Top 4 Best White Hat Hackers

1. Charlie Miller

Charlie is a software researcher with Uber and has spent five years as an agent for the NSA. Mr. Miller won $5000 for cracking Safari and $10,000 in  cash at the annual Pwn20nw conference where he found numerous exploits of Apple’s products, including a very important vulnerability in the Macbook Air. He stated that most of his yearly earnings are made by working with Apple to find and fix vulnerabilities.

2. Joe Stewart

Currently Stewart works for Dell SecureWorks as the director of malware research. He is considered a leading authority on malware and other online based threats. He has been a speaker at various IT Security conferences, and has worked with organizations that help to build more secure networks as a way to fight back against malicious hackers.

3. Mark Maiffret

Mark is the Chief Technology Officer at Beyond Trust Security and Compliance Management. Before joining them he founded the digital security company eEye back in 1998, which made web application firewalls and vulnerability management products, several of which earned him product awards. Maiffret has a long list of valuable vulnerability finds for Microsoft, and prides himself on knowing that he leads the number one vulnerability security team in the United States.

4. Dan Kaminsky

Dan is a Computer Security Researcher and the Chief Scientist at White Ops, a specialty firm that detects, researches, and fights malware. Best known for his work in fighting DNS cache poisoning and for showing Sony that they were infected with a rootkit that affected over 500,000 computers, Kaminsky is very well known in the cyber security field.

If you liked this article, follow us on Twitter @themerklenews and make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to receive the latest bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and technology news.