What makes a Security 7 award winner? In our 10th year of honoring outstanding information security professionals, we looked for security practitioners of good standing in seven markets, and then decided that we needed to move beyond those confines to recognize true stewards of progress in 2014.

This year’s winners include a former NSA director turned scholar, a community builder, a hardware “hacker,” a mobile software engineer, a health information-sharing visionary, and we posthumously recognize a dedicated steward of information security, who will be greatly missed.