Elias Levy (also known as Aleph One), was the moderator of the full disclosure vulnerability mailing list Bugtraq from May 141996, until he stepped down on October 152001. He was the CTO and co-founder of the computer security company SecurityFocus, which was acquired by Symantec on August 62002. He is better known as the author of the article "Smashing The Stack For Fun and Profit", published in 1996Phrack magazine issue 49, which was the first high-quality public step-by-step introduction to stack buffer overflow vulnerabilities and their exploitation.
After the sale of SecurityFocus by Symantec in August 2002, Levy was accused by many of "selling out" and compromising the high principles of the Bugtraq list. The "Full-Disclosure" mailing list was founded in part as a protest to the sale.