Bethesda, MD, Oct. 12, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Most experienced defenders learned to think like an attacker informally, through a mentor, a mailing list, and whatever systems they were allowed to break. Closing that gap has been the work of Ed Skoudis for three decades, transforming individual craft into a teachable, scalable, and continuously improving professional discipline. Due to his work, the Cyber Security Hall of Fame has named him to its Class of 2026 in the category of Cybersecurity Educator and Practitioner.
Skoudis, President of the SANS Technology Institute, is being inducted alongside industry heavyweights Rob Joyce, Amit Yoran, Steve Ryan, and Richard Seewald. Announcing the class, Hall of Fame Co-Founder and Chair Larry Letow described the five honorees as each having made a lasting contribution to the industry. Regarding Ed Skoudis, Letow highlights him as one of cybersecurity’s most influential educators, practitioners, and innovators having influenced generations of professionals, and his work as having helped transform how they learn, practice, and prepare to defend against threats.
"Plenty of people in this industry are good at the technical work. Ed cared about the harder bit — making someone else great at it, under pressure, on a deadline, with a real adversary on the other side. He spent thirty years building whatever was missing to do it, and his efforts run through every course, range, and challenge we put in front of students today. So many people across this industry learned from Ed, directly or a step removed, that no one could count them all. Ed taught the people who define this industry," said James Lyne, CEO of SANS Institute.
Three decades of building how the profession learns
More than 40,000 students and professionals have taken courses written by Skoudis. He was the original author of two popular SANS courses, SEC504: Hacker Tools, Techniques, and Incident Handling and SEC560: Enterprise Penetration Testing, and in 2008 he founded the SANS Penetration Testing Curriculum, now the largest penetration testing training program in the world.
The teaching sits on infrastructure he built to make it possible. Skoudis founded Counter Hack, the consultancy and cyber range company whose team designed the well-known NetWars cyber range, now used by U.S. military units, government agencies around the world, and commercial organizations in numerous sectors with significant assets at risk. The same team built CyberCity, an urban cyber warfare simulator used to train U.S. Cyber Command operators. He is also the key architect of the festive SANS Holiday Hack Challenge, which has engaged hundreds of thousands of learners over more than 20 years and remains free and open year-round to anyone at any skill level.
Outside the office and the classroom, the White House brought Skoudis in to test the security viability of the Trusted Internet Connection, the architecture now protecting U.S. government networks, and he has demonstrated attacker techniques for the United States Senate. He has also been an expert witness on more than one hundred cyber breach cases over the past 25 years, including some of the largest breaches in history, taking what he learned in each case and folding those vital defensive lessons into the courses and ranges he has built. In 2015, the Military Cyber Professionals Association inducted him into its Order of Thor for his contributions to the cybersecurity training of U.S. military personnel. He has keynoted RSA Conference for more than fifteen years and has authored or co-authored four books that have shaped how the field thinks about its work.
In 2021, following a unanimous vote of its Board of Directors, Skoudis succeeded SANS founder Alan Paller as President of the SANS Technology Institute. Paller himself was inducted into the Cyber Security Hall of Fame in 2024. Under the leadership of Skoudis, SANS.edu is accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education and in June 2022 the National Security Agency designated it a Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense.
“I am profoundly grateful to my colleagues at SANS, who have encouraged me and built things with me for nearly 30 years, to the hacker community, which has truly inspired me and pushed me to get better every step of the way, and to my incredible students, who have taught me more than they will ever realize. This honor belongs to decades of work by a whole lot of wonderful, inspiring, and amazing people. My name happens to be the one on the list, but I am accepting it for all of them,” said Ed Skoudis, President of the SANS Technology Institute and SANS Fellow.
The induction ceremony and dinner will be held Thursday, December 10, 2026, at Live! Casino & Hotel Maryland in Hanover, Maryland. For more information about the event, visit cybersecurityhalloffame.org.
About SANS
The SANS Institute was established in 1989 as a cooperative research and education organization. Today, SANS is the most trusted and, by far, the largest provider of cybersecurity training and certification to professionals in government and commercial institutions worldwide. Renowned SANS instructors teach more than 85 courses at in-person and virtual cybersecurity events and OnDemand. GIAC, an affiliate of the SANS Institute, validates practitioner skills through more than 50 hands-on technical certifications in cybersecurity. The SANS Technology Institute, a regionally accredited independent subsidiary, offers master's and bachelor's degrees, graduate certificates, and an undergraduate certificate in cybersecurity. SANS also delivers a wide variety of free resources to the InfoSec community, including consensus projects, research reports, webcasts, podcasts, and newsletters; it also operates the Internet's early warning system, the Internet Storm Center. At the heart of SANS are the many security practitioners representing varied global organizations, from corporations to universities, working together to support and educate the global information security community.
Jenn Elston SANS Institute 301-654-7267 press@sans.org