A better (but less emotionally evocative) example might be Linux Pauling, who made large contributions to chemistry (eventually winning the nobel prize), but who in later life became a proponent of pseudoscience (megavitamin therapy).

I can't say whether this paper is nonsense or legitimate, but people making major contributions to their field and then going off in interesting directions isn't unprecedented.

Odlyzko, despite having some notable contributions to index calculus algorithms, was not among the first to invent or suggest its use.

A person who makes an important contribution to science can still say stupid and dangerous things.

I appreciate Andrew Odlyzko’s contributions to cs, but this paper is not one of them. It is a fine example of the evolution security nihilism in its final, tenured form.

And I think it's very arguable that there have been. There have been provable infiltrations of infrastructure, undermining of democratic processes, and that's not counting the more 'mundane' cyberattacks. STUXNET was an attack on a nuclear facility that had real-world, hardware effects; that's a digital disaster, just one in which the outcome isn't objectionable to a good chunk of western observers.