Thomas Dullien / Halvar Flake started work in reverse engineering and digital rights management in the mid-90s, and began to apply reverse engineering to vulnerability research shortly thereafter. He pioneered early windows heap exploitaiton, patch diffing / bindiffing and various other reverse engineering techniques. In 2004, he started zynamics, a company focused on reverse engineering technologies. He continued to publish about reverse engineering, ROP gadget search, and knowledge management technologies in relation to reverse engineering. In 2011, zynamics was acquired by Google, and Halvar spent the next few years working on defensive technologies that leveraged the then hot buzzwords "big data" and "machine learning". In summer 2015, Halvar received the lifetime achievement Pwnie, and decided to take a year off to travel, read, and surf. Since November 2016, he is back at Google.