Redazione RHC : 18 October 2025 22:03
Joanna Rutkowska was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1981 and is a software engineer known primarily for her malware and low-level security research. She is the founder and former CEO of Invisible Things Lab Company, a company primarily dedicated to cybersecurity research, training, and consulting.
She is considered one of the most important hackers in the world.
From a young age, he showed great interest and a passion for computers. While still in elementary school, he began learning the programming language using MS-DOS. At the age of 14, he created his first piece of malware, a virus. He graduated with a master’s degree in computer science from the Warsaw University of Technology.
Joanna Rutkowska has worked primarily in three fields: malware research and attacks on the operating system kernel, as well as virtualization system security and general security software.
He argues that antivirus programs are very weak because they only pick up previously identified threats and are vulnerable. He believes that security policies should be aimed at creating secure operating systems with effective technologies to combat attacks.
Rutkowska argues that the main security problem for most operating systems is that they run on large kernels that perform all the functions, so if one thread is compromised, the entire system is compromised. She proposes using the microkernel model so that such systems can perform their basic functions in isolation, to prevent a kernel attack from compromising the entire system.
It became known to the general public at the Black Hat Briefings conference in Las Vegas in August 2006. At the conference, Microsoft presented the new version of its operating system: Windows Vista.
While Microsoft held conferences on the security of this new version of the operating system, Joanna Rutkowska demonstrated how to insert malware she herself developed into the Windows Vista kernel.
In the first part of the presentation, Rutkowska discussed how to circumvent Windows Vista’s kernel protection by demonstrating how to load unsigned code into it. The second part of the presentation introduced a technique called Blue Pill. It could be described as a rootkit technology, allowing potentially malicious code to take control of the system through the use of CPU virtualization. This method, although presented and implemented on the Vista system, is operating system independent and does not exploit any vulnerabilities in the operating system.
His reputation as a white hat hacker grew after exposing numerous attacks on Intel virtualization systems and security technologies, including the famous series of exploits against Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT). His skills have earned him numerous speaking invitations at major conferences such as RSA, RISK, Black Hat, the Gartner IT Security Summit, and others.
In 2007 he founded Invisible Things Lab, a computer security research company, primarily dedicated to developing and protecting against malware and attacks on operating systems, as well as creating ways to avoid them.
She also runs training courses and conferences, having been invited to numerous Black Hat conferences. Within this company, in 2010, she and her collaborator Rafal Wojtczuk created a new operating system called Qubes, focused on providing more efficient security for portable computers (laptops).
On the pages of his company, the Invisible Things Lab Company, he reported some personal notes, which we report below:
I firmly believe that individual freedom is the most important value. This includes, for example, the ability of individuals to choose who to entrust with various aspects of their lives.
I’m human, though I can significantly separate emotions from work. This means I can appreciate the ideas and work of people I would otherwise despise as human beings. Ideas, science, and technology have no morality. It’s annoying how so many people don’t seem to understand this.
I feel comfortable and happy being a woman, even though I realize the absurdity of the rigid classification of human beings into two simple subsets: male and female, and I have always been surprised at how profoundly this affects people.
I’m also a feminist. I wish there were more women in science and technology. I also wish more women had more self-confidence. At the same time, I’m concerned about the superficial promotion of women just because they are women.
Redazione