Defense Department Eyes Hacker Con For New Recruits

alphadogg writes "The US Air Force has found an unlikely source of new recruits: the yearly Defcon hacking conference, which has been running since Thursday in Las Vegas. Col. Michael Convertino came to Defcon for the first time last year, and after finding about 60 good candidates for both enlisted and civilian positions, decided to come back again. Federal agencies have only recently begun embracing the hacker crowd. When US Department of Defense director of futures exploration Jim Christy hosted his first Defcon 'Meet the Fed' panel in 1999, he was one of two people onstage. At this week's Defcon, there may be several thousand federal employees in attendance, he said."

Comments

Isn't this an obvious way to recruit

[ta bu shi da yu]

Seriously, these events attract at lot of smart, independent thinking people who love technology. What better place to recruit people? If it works at Universities, then it probably works better at DefCon.

I guess they were worried about the "independent thinking" before...

Re:Isn't this an obvious way to recruit

[russotto]

Seriously, these events attract at lot of smart, independent thinking people who love technology. What better place to recruit people?

Emphasis mine. Civilian positions are one thing, but it seems to me if you put a smart and independent thinking person through the military's recruit-crusher, you're either going to get a non-independent-thinking person, a smart and independent thinking person who has been faking non-independent thinking and hates the military for it, or a corpse.

Hackers & discipline... probably not the best combination ever.

Re:Isn't this an obvious way to recruit

[TheRaven64]

Depends on the task. Strict discipline is needed in some parts of the military because if you hesitate when following an order, it can cost lives. This isn't the case for a lot of support services. Hackers recruited by this kind of process are going to be doing things like penetration testing on the DoD networks, designing ways of compromising enemy systems without detection, and so on. This kind of thing doesn't have anything like the same requirements as a front-line soldier. It's been a while since I worked with the military, but they're generally willing to put up with a lot of eccentricities if they don't threaten lives. If they weren't, they'd have a serious shortage of senior officers...

Re:Isn't this an obvious way to recruit

[xxuserxx]

I was an IT in the navy for 6 years and I still encountered high stress. I was on a DDG so the crew was around 300. We had a lot of colatteral duties requiring me to take up arms from a 9mm to .50 cal mounted big ass gun. Also General Quarters requires everyone to be in a critical thinking life or death situation. Its very rare that you will never be put in danger. 9/11 one of the planes that hit the Pentagon hit the one of the offices of a Navy IT dept that was basicly an intel command. Your a target just for being in the military.

Re:Isn't this an obvious way to recruit

[russotto]

And they've probably never met anyone who was. Military knowledge in this crowd usually stops somewhere around the US Civil War or WWI, because they really do think of those guys as cannon fodder.

So there's no more breaking down recruits as individuals in order to build them up as soldiers? I find that hard to believe.

Re:Isn't this an obvious way to recruit

[falconwolf]

Seriously, these events attract at lot of smart, independent thinking people who love technology. What better place to recruit people? If it works at Universities, then it probably works better at DefCon.

I guess they were worried about the "independent thinking" before...

It's a love hate relationship. Though the military doesn't like free or independent thinkers, it has also used them. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA has funded research at a number of universities, some considered more leftist than others. The internet itself is built in part by hackers and other explorers and uses open source software.

Falcon

So much for "spot the fed".

[jcr]

I guess in the next year or two, it will be "spot the non-fed."

-jcr

Discipline vs patriotism

[BadAnalogyGuy]

While perhaps not the most disciplined troops in the group, Americans who hvae passed through the educational system and who have access to a television are well-versed in patriotism.

What the military doesn't need is free-thinkers. Hackers, by virtue of their status as hackers, are not necessarily free-thinkers. If they've passed through the American educational system, they've already been trained as much as the military needs. The American public school system is designed to train patriots. I wouldn't worry that these "hackers" are incompletely trained.

This years Defcon: Not good

[thenextstevejobs]

I drove all the way down to Vegas from SF Thursday, and by Friday evening I was ready to get out of there. I went to a few panels and was thoroughly underwhelmed. It was crowded, not exciting. Several people walked out of talks. I overheard some other people say "maybe tomorrow will be better". Well, I don't know because I sold my badge and bailed early.

Not to say that there couldn't have been some good smart people to hire there. But after the level of disappointingness Defcon had to offer, I'm no longer impressed. The atmosphere definitely did not inspire me to want to hire anybody.

Re:This years Defcon: Not good

[Opportunist]

DC kinda got stale lately. I can't put my finger on it, but compared to other cons, even the public ones like BH or even VB, they really lost their edge. As much as I hate the word "mainstream", but it seems DC got that label. It's become yet another con where business and government goes to exchange views, it's gone from a hacker's "insider" con to a "commercial" con. Certainly good for their income and maybe the only way to finance something like that, but depressing when you think of the things that happened there a few years ago.

Security is very discouraging.

[Animats]

Security is very discouraging. I was in the field a long time ago and got fed up. It's just hopeless. The same problems come up over and over.

• Microsoft has the mindset that anything executable that comes near their operating system should immediately be executed. CDs and DVDs autorun. USB devices autorun. Active-X controls autorun. Universal Plug and Play stuff autoruns. Yes, they now have some "security controls" on this, which sometimes actually work.
• Remote update. Not only is patch downloading a lousy way to prevent security problems, the download process itself introduces a huge backdoor. With every two-bit application now supporting remote update, it's easy to find an attack vector.
• Overly powerful "install" mechanisms. Apple had it approximately right in the original MacOS; an application was one file with a resource fork. Delete one file and the app was gone. Now, installers expect to run with administrator privileges and blither all over the machine.
• Crappy security models. We know what works - mandatory security with integrity levels. The trouble is that most apps whine when made to work under those restrictions.
• Thirty years of buffer overflows. The fundamental problem is that the C and C++ concept of arrays is broken. The language has no idea how big an array is. That's defective by design. The C++ crowd tries to paper over the problem with templates, but the mold always comes through the wallpaper. Most of the newer languages come with a gonzo interpretive system underneath, which makes them slow, overly complex, or both.

That's just part of the list. I don't see a determined effort to fix the underlying problems. Given that, it's hopeless.

Re:This years Defcon: SERIOUSLY Not good

[q2a]

I held in and was probably the one you heard, "maybe tomorrow will be better." Nope.

The words "sell out" came to mind. Remember the early burning-man days? Defcon was once a group that met for a "love of the craft" that has become a certification desktoper recruitment fest.

Sad really, maybe time to let this one go the way of E3 no?