The Diana Initiative 2020

We often assume 'Barrier Breaker' means that someone was 'the first' or 'the only' to do something and what happens after that is almost a foregone conclusion . That's not how barriers get broken. It's kind of like saying, "a single drop of water breaks the dam", when we know that it takes a critical mass of water, a flood, before the dam will break. In security, especially, we reward the 'lone hacker' who discovers a zero-day and tend to dismiss those that come behind who identify similar classes of vulnerabilities or the same vulnerability presented in different ways--as if those discoveries aren't equally remarkable. Barrier breaking isn't a one-person phenomenon, it is a movement of people committed to change. Using a handful of examples, I will highlight some barrier breakers in our industry and provide actionable methods that each of us, day by day, and byte by byte, can use to become better barrier breakers.