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Would You Hire A Hacker?
theodp writes "A German security company has divided opinion in the IT industry by offering a job to the teen charged with creating Sasser. Silicon.com asks its CIO Jury: Would you hire a hacker? and finds the jury split down the middle, with one IT Director saying doing so would be like hiring serial-killing doctor Harold Shipman to treat your ailing and aged mother."
It'd be more like hiring a doctor who was convicted of illegal cloning experiments to work on alternatives to organ transplants.
What a loaded question?
Would I hire a worm-writing kid? No.
Would I hire a gray-hat security genius? Absolutely.
A security company might benefit from his experience, or even just the marketting angle "the best hackers work for us!"
In the field I'm in, he'd be a liability. We do government stuff, relating to law enforcement, and while we're not a bunch of angels, we don't want any skeletons in our closet either.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Yeah, I don't think this kid is all too bright compared to a lot of other hackers. I mean, for one, he got caught.
The FBI hired Frank Abagnale Jr. as a counterfeit specialist and it turned out to be a good thing. Why? Because he was just a freaking teenage KID that happened to be misguided through lack of maturity. If this teen hacker was given a little direction and purpose with his life then he could steer everything completely around.
I can't believe that comment about hiring him being similar to hiring a serial killer as a doctor. The director that spoke that comment is an idiot.
Hackers create, crackers destroy.
And while you are busy trying to make this assertion to a hiring manager, somebody else who doesn't deal with pedantic stuff like "hacker vs cracker" is taking your job.
I don't respond to AC's.
It doesn't necessarily prove any talent at all.
It proves they go to their favorite hacker website, download some proof of concept code, and wrap some VBScript around it.
I wouldn't call Sasser a work of genious, but a work of pure assholery. He didn't invent something, or do it to prove a point. The point was proven, the exploit was known. He did it to be a 1337 h4x0r.
I think the fact that these teens exist is a result of their own stupidity. Guess what, you want to commit crimes for attention, it just might fuck your entire life up.
Try and get a job in retail with a shoplifting conviction. Try and get a job as a kindergarten teacher with an assault conviction. Try and get anywhere in politics with virually any conviction greater than a traffic violation.
Boo hoo for teens too stupid to realize actions have consequences, sometimes life long consequences. And I'm sick of people blaming "the education system" or "society".
This kid was mentally developed enough to know what he was doing was wrong, and did it anyways. He's lucky to be offered a job doing anything more technical than digging holes in the dirt.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
If a company's entire basis is the fact that their employees do not (or did not, if truly grey hat...) have integrity, they're sunk before they leave dock.
In the same breath, I will just state what I have seen someone else on /. state, and I found humorous: black hats are good hackers, white hats are good fakers, and grey hats are good liars.
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
Hmmm... clearly if this kid has any brains he would know that he is under scrutiny. So what's he going to do? Spend all day looking for where the logs are kept and trying to get into the machine that stores them. It would be trivial to find out which machine is storing them because a connection has to be opened to his computer at some point and not only that since the logs would be generated on the machine and downloaded, assuming there wasn't a persistent connection for continual download which would also be blatantly obvious, the log file itself would be the perfect vector for malicious code.
For most crackers it is the thrill of defeating someone in power that gets them going. Trying to control him would only encourage him. No, if you can't trust him, then don't hire him, and someone that consistently has moral lapses is clearly not trustworthy.