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White Hat Hacker Breaks Silence
Flackboy Kevin writes "The nation's hackers are about to come out of their shells on Friday as one of the most notorious 'good guys' in Manhattan makes a rare-yet-cyber public appearance on USA Today's online chat. Gary Morse, Manhattan's white hat hacker and good friend of every Chief Security Officer in the financial world agreed to an online chat regarding security.
Morse's uncanny knowledge of how Manhattan is wired helps keep him one step ahead of hackers and has kept him in high disregard in most hacker communities. Morse's company, Razorpoint Security Technologies does not employ hackers who've decided to come in from the cold."
Actually, I can understand this, being held in rather "high disregard" myself in some circles.
Ah, the joys of being the "Prince of Insufficient Light"
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
Do Slashdot editors realize how many security consultancies there are in New York City, even leaving out the credible names like @Stake and IBM?
Do Slashdot editors honestly believe that major financial firms in NYC don't already have a track record of hiring and retaining exceptional security engineers? Do they honestly believe that a major financial needs Gary Morse to tell them what a firewall does for them?
Haven't the Slashdot editors ever seen that silly flash video with "Kimball" and "Dataprotekt"? Heard about the subsequent investor fraud story? Recognized that maybe real security firms don't market themselves on "white hats staying ahead of the evil hackers" hype?
Did the Slashdot editors think of visiting Razorpoint's website, where we find white papers with scintillating security insights like "security is a process" and "here's how to read a CIDR address"? Or notice the lack of advisories, research papers, or bios of credible security researchers on the site?
Maybe these are smart people. Maybe they secretly have Citicorp and Bank of America on their client list.
Or maybe they're just a bunch of wannabes.
Why are we supposed to be interested in this crap?
"Morse's uncanny knowledge of how Manhattan is wired helps keep him one step ahead of hackers " keep in mind things have changed a lot since he devoloped his 'code' sends out a "dot dot dot - dash dash dash - dot dot dot - i'm being hacked!!! " the first bit was SOS in morese code if you didn't know Steve
Here is the text of a recent interview with the
reclusive security wonk from Crain's New York Business.
On the job with...
Gary Morse
Founder and CEO
Razorpoint Security
Keeping a company's computer systems and networks secure from intruders used to be the responsibility of mid-level IT managers. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, the job landed on the desk of company CEOs. Executives in all sorts of industries woke up to the fact that security--of everything from the front door to the mailroom PC--has to be a top management concern.
The new consciousness has proved a boon for companies like Razorpoint Security, which was founded in Manhattan in 2000 and saw its business take off after the attacks. Razorpoint tests just how secure a company's network is by trying to hack into it. The company then does the follow-up work of fixing problems and performing regular network audits. Crainsny.com's Judy Messina talks with Razorpoint founder and CEO Gary Morse.
Crainsny.com: Describe what Razorpoint does.
Gary Morse: In the simplest terms, you can think of us as professional hackers. We're tech professionals who in the past have built large-scale networks, including major sites on the Internet. That helps us know where the pitfalls in systems are and how to break things. Once we find vulnerabilities, we demonstrate them in a very comprehensive report. If we're able to crack passwords, for example, we'll show the list of passwords or a screen shot of them. We want to drive the point home.
Then, one of the three things happens. The company has trained staff who are capable of fixing the problems and they use our report as a roadmap. Others ask us to do the remediation for them. In the third category, and this is coming up more and more, is the client who is overwhelmed and understaffed, and we go in and act as their temporary IT security arm for a while.
Crainsny.com: How do you convince executives that their networks are vulnerable?
Gary Morse: At one firm half the executive board wanted to bring us in and the other half was on the fence. They had all the buzzwords, the firewalls, all the security products you're supposed to have. But when they finally hired us, in less than one week we had control of every device on their network - every server, every desktop computer, every laptop. We even logged on to the system as the president and we wrote an email in his name. The screen shot of that email was one of the prominent pieces in our presentation to the executive board. We had to break the report in two pieces it was so big.
Crainsny.com: What are the most common holes you find in computer systems?
Gary Morse: There's everything from the seemingly insignificant to the colossally devastating. You can have a poorly configured web server or mail server sitting next to a server with financial information. One time, we found a fax machine talking to a phone system so that a document on somebody's work station was being sent over the network as if it were being faxed. Somebody had set up the connection and forgot about it.
Crainsny.com: What do companies need to do to make their systems secure?
Gary Morse: They need to think about what services they truly need in order to be online. Security is a process not a product. There is no shrink wrapped thing you take off a shelf and install. New vulnerabilities are coming out every hour.
Crainsny.com: What changes did you see after 9/11?
Gary Morse: We saw more security awareness. The bar was raised quite a bit. People who had been on the fence about doing regular security audits were certainly calling us a lot more than we were calling them. The year 2002 was a big year for us. We grew roughly 300%.
Crainsny.com: You said new vulnerabilities are surfacing every day. What should companies be preparing themselves for?
Gary Morse: Web and web application vulnerabilities and wireless security issues are going to be concerns. In the past year, a lot of w
I have no pants and I must scream
he is an expert in attack/penetration testing :-D
tat tat ta
Um...was he ever in jail?
The idea that people can accurately make a decision on whether or not someone is going to be a quality employee based on whether or not they have done some Blackhat-oriented activities in the past is ludicrous.
It totally depends on the situation. Some people did very illegal things that hurt no one, others did not get caught doing much of anything, have a far cleaner record, and shouldn't be let within 50 miles of a Security operation.
Moral issues are always complex. All people being looked at for a sensitive position, regardless of history, need to be looked at on a case by case basis. Of course someone's past should be taken into consideration, but an in-depth interview and background check is far more productive than simply writing people off based on a title that they may have had at one point in their lives.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
It's cracker dammit...
.: Max Romantschuk
Maybe the title should instead be "White Hat Hacker Breaks Wind"
Ok, I may be being dense, and I expect some flameage if I am. 9/11 had lots to do with unsecure aircraft. It had lots to do with media sensationalism. It even had lots to do with structural design! But please explain wtf it had to do with unsecure networks? Did the terrorists hack to get their plane tickets? I know they didn't need to hack to plan it cause the airlines publish their flightlists and times. I know, they hacked their way into flight school right? This assclown is playing on peoples fears and its intensly disgusting. The reason he doesn't have any hackers "from the cold" is that most of them have morals and would refuse to work for one displayed such a gaping lack of them. I hope he gets hacked and they report his REAL earnings to the IRS....
Look forward to script kiddies among others trying to hack the broadcast to gain noteriety.
I think this will be interesting to watch too.
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
AC, there may be many bright people in New York, but you are not one of them if you overlook this. Some of us might be interesed in asking pointed questions that millions of people will see when the sit in on the USA Today chat this particular consultant is about to have. My questions are, "Would you recomend free software, such as Debian or Red Hat, on the desktop?" and "What makes Microsoft software so insecure?" Other people here could have better questions.
I highly recomend everyone to go and post questions about free software solutions to security problems. The answers he provides will be seen by the chat crowd and may be turned into an article for printed USA Today. There are 750,000 Slashdotters all interested in free software and security? This interest should be reflected in the questions. Follow the link and submit as many good questions as you can think up.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Listen, his position of not hiring ex-black-hats makes a ton of sense, whether or not ex-black-hats are the best at detecting security flaws.
A person who has been a black hat has been so, specifically because they did not have the moral fortitude to remain on the white side. Now, that can change when there is a profound revelation [Dr. Laura Schlessinger], or when there is a ton of incentive [G.W. Bush], or because they were caught and decided the price was too high [many haxors who have been caught flip in this way] or it can appear to change when convenient [psychotics.]
But the fact is, you don't really know why it changed, and therefore you don't really know if it changed. So you don't let ex-black-hats work for your company, period.
Now, if a black hat did have some profound change, that doesn't mean that there isn't work for him. Assuming that it is not prohibited by court order, he can start donating information to the security watchdog groups, and they can verify the information on their own. If it is illegal for them to be using the internet or interfacing with computers, they can wait until it is again allowed. Or they often can instead put their skills to use building new systems, or writing code for a supposedly secure system -- on paper.
Anyhow, I have no idea whether the claim is true or untrue, that ex-black-hats make good white hats. But Morse's position makes a lot of sense.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's