NTP's author, Eric Fair, is actually the son of the founder of Fair-Issac. Very smart cat, but this was all written so, so long ago it was bound to be exploitable sooner or later.
NTP's "author" --where author is defined as author of the original RFC (958), every subsequent RFC (1305, 5905, etc) and reference implementation-- is Prof. David Mills. Prof. Mills is one of the unsung heros of the internet.
