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Hacker Jeff Moss Sworn Into Homeland Security Advisory Council
Wolfgang Kandek writes "Hacker Jeff Moss, founder of computer security conferences DEFCON and Black Hat, has been sworn in as one of the new members of the Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC) of the DHS. Moss, who goes by the handle 'the Dark Tangent' says he was surprised to be asked to join the council and that he was nominated to bring an 'outside perspective' to its meetings. He said, 'I know there is a new-found emphasis on cybersecurity, and they're looking to diversify the members and to have alternative viewpoints. I think they needed a skeptical outsider's view because that has been missing.'"
That Obama chap keeps making some inspired decisions - we could do with someone like him over here (UK) to bring a bit of change.
perhaps... just perhaps his background (read: _not a stuffed shirt_ ) will allow him to say "look, this is a problem and if you dont realise it you're an idiot and these are the very real consequences" hes not beholden to any voter or company and has no political baggage. if the sky is falling he can definily say it is without worrying about constituents or political parties
i wage a holy war against the apostrophe.
It's better than hackers not having any voice in government. I commend him. If he is able to turn around even one asinine governmental security policy, it's a step forward at least. Who knows? Maybe the US government will come to recognize us as the valuable resource we are because of our intimate knowledge of the systems that make up the modern world. Maybe hell will freeze over, pigs will fly, and the cows will come home. Well we can hope anyway!
He may employ a similar tactic to the one I use when I have to deal with people above me in political clout on issues of a technical nature
Rather than play their game, I simply produce a highly condensed set of the major risks that would be caused if the activity I recommend does not take place, then wander round to whoever it is that's trying to hold it all up/derail it, and get them to sign at the bottom of the page (has to fit on one side of paper) saying they agree that the risk is all on their own head and that they accept it entirely be not performing the activity.
You then leave with a signature, or the support for the activity. You'd be surprised by how many people don't even try to understand the matter until their head is on the block for it. The pen is truly mightier than the sword sometimes.
If they don't sign, they lose a lot of respect for trying to dodge the matter.
I guess I'll give the perspective here of a very small (yet dedicated) section of the hacker community. I have retired from hacking, but the hacker community still interests me, and I feel a responsibility with some others in guiding it.
As far as myself, I was on H/P sub-boards of BBSs in the early/mid 1980s, and did use the Feature Group B (950-XXXX) codes they posted to phreak, but I put that aside because I did not begin to seriously hack (and phreak) until 1989, and I retired in 1996, the day I began working for an ISP. I personally have met many members of LoD, MoD, BoW, l0ck and so forth, have gone to many cons and 2600 meetings, have gone on trashing runs, talked to them on "confs" (conference calls), on BBSs, IRC etc.
Perhaps I'll search for more original links later, but Gweeds speech at H2K2 in July 2002 is what was really the clarion call of the white hat backlash. That speech was great, and expressed what I felt for a long time but hadn't heard anyone else say.
This web page is dedicated to the white hat backlash as well.
Actually, the anti-whitehat movement in my mind has itself already split. There are the older people like me, Gweeds and some others who primarily want to delineate this line between hacking and the security industry. They are two separate things, in fact, they are against each other - the security community arrests and jails hackers. The idea that there can be a grey hat who is between white hat and black hat is ridiculous, you are either a hacker, or you are working for the security industry and law enforcement. I think even a lot of anti-hacker people would agree with us on that one.
Most of us are older, most of us don't hack any more, and the people in this movement or tendency that Gweeds became a spokesman for I have noticed are also in the anarchist movement. After all, Gweeds talked about anarchism a lot, I have been involved in the anarchist movement, and I know others of our mindset (some who I feel have expressed sympathetic sentiments are in the cDc).
I myself more than most of this group are in a political plain at the cross-section of anarchism and Marxism. So being one more of a dialectic bent, I think the progression of what has happened - people hacked until the mid 1990s, in the mid 1990s many hackers entered the security industry and the hacking movement died out to a large degree, then Gweeds made his speech in 2002 and the hacking movement is still moribund, but has some more self-awareness now anyhow. The rise and fall of IT with the dot-coms caused a chain of reactions. Perhaps the rise and fall of IT within FIRE (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) will have some reaction as well.
I think what is more important is I think the expression of the "hacker ethic" has always been bullshit. Whether it was what the Mentor said, or that Phrack or 2600 talked about. 2600 has said things like "Companies should be glad we're hacking as we're showing them holes before the bad guys do" which sounds ridiculous to me from a hacker perspective, and I'm sure sounds ridiculous to law enforcement and companies being hacked. Gweeds, and some of the people who picked up the torch of what he said have refined that.
I myself think another criticism has to be made, not just of the white hats, but of the crowd which I'll call the 4chan/Anonymous crowd. I think what they're doing is a new development, is sort of in the spirit of hacking, but misses the boat in a few ways.
Nah. He can still "leak" stuff. (Hey, they asked him to be their expert. If he can't circumvent their "leak protection" [whatever that might be], then nobody can. ^^)
He can also destroy them from within, in case they become/are too evil to bear.
It's nearly impossible for this to be bad for us. :)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Technically, you are certainly right. The NSA are brilliant in practical cryptography etc.. However, the current security disaster we call the internet is directly linked to the NSA. If they hadn't been so determined to block strong crypto for so many years; if they had actually understood the importance of computing security to the future of their nation; if they had done their job right, many things could be better. Some sensible mechanism like IPSEC could easily be standard everywhere. A civilian standard for basic secure systems could be widely recognised. Many consumer standard systems could have much better security. Having them decide cyber security policy has been a disaster which has left the commercial infrastructure of the USA and the rest of the world needlessly insecure. Having people from the outside who actually see this has to be better.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Jeff is hardly a maniac, he's an expert in computer security. Far from a PR stunt, this is an effort to get somebody who knows how to secure computer systems involved in *gasp* security.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
Kevin Mitnick and Adrian Lamo do not seem to like the idea of Moss getting the nod. Mitnick prefers Bruce Schneier while Lamo believes Moss is a suit, "the reality is he's as corporate as hiring someone out of Microsoft."
I wonder what the reaction in the tech community would have been had the 2 above gotten the call instead.
Yeah, but would he be able to avoid canary traps?
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Where have you been? The federal government frowns on talking about obvious security holes because doing so makes them exploitable. As long as we pretend that the DoD and other government agencies are properly securing their networks the crackers can't get in.
And where have you been? I've been inside the federal government. I've seen them (us) use all that public knowledge and tools to deal with the security issues we've had. I've attended security conferences on the Fed's dime where information from open discussions were brought back to help deal with our vulnerabilities. The Feds have benefited greatly from open security discourse. That's not to say the Fed is effective with infosec. In recent years they've woken up to the fact that they're sorely lacking. Unfortunately, their response has been to turn the issue in to an exercise in red tape that generates a lot of effort - only a fraction of which goes to actually securing the systems involved. And that's why we get agencies that think they've secured their networks when they haven't (the more redtape exists, the more loopholes there are). It's not all a case of the Emperor's New Clothes.
Of course Jeff Moss was invited into the Homeland Security Advisory Committee, he has been organizing events for over ten years to collect information about hackers in the computer underground. Anyone who goes to DEFCON or Black Hat is immediately "on the radar" of every three letter agency here and abroad. He's an FBI stooge, always has been, always will be.
Jeff Moss initially got started as an FBI informant working with members of the "Legion of Doom"; his FBI handler was named Dick Brandis, a former polygrapher for the Pittsburgh PA Federal Bureau of Investigation. Brandis eventually ended up resigning from the Pittsburgh FBI for taking classified government information home with him and establishing his own network of hackers that Moss et al would get into compromising positions and then blackmail for information and unpublished exploits.
Um, no, you have remembered incorrectly. There as a girl with you taking film pictures of myself, Dom, K0re, and another person and trying to be clever about it. I turned a non functioning web cam around at your group to essentially say "It works both ways"