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

[Darth_brooks]

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

Score -1: So wrong it hurts to read.

The best hackers i know of are the ones who *are* disciplined. Go to sourceforge and look at the overwhelming number of half assed, dead projects the clutter up the works. The best open source projects are the ones that have taken years of hard work to reach maturity. That's real discipline.

The linux kernel wasn't written in a nights hacking in Linus' moms basement. It takes years of dedication and hard work to get to the level of "holy freaking crap, that guy is amazing" hacking. Simply knocking around around in perl does not a hacker make. For ever 10 hackers out there that won't put up with the bullshit that military service brings, there are probably one or two who will go that extra mile. Kudos to the air force for figuring that out.

Re:Isn't this an obvious way to recruit

[Runaway1956]

"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."

And, may I ask how many years you served, and in what branch?

In my 8 years of service, I was never made aware that I should think some sort of "group think". In fact, those people who were advanced most rapidly generally though "outside the box". My own meritorious advancement to E-5 was a result of having both balls and brains. (lest anyone asks, I never had brawn - just plenty of balls) That is to say, I saw the situation differently than my leaders, and I took some initiative to accomplish the mission.

The day the military begins hammering independent thought out of men's heads, the military will most definitely fail.

To be perfectly honest, your statement is pretty insulting to veterans. It suggests that men and women who complete one or more tours of duty successfully are either mindless puppets, or dishonest people. If that is what you really mean, then maybe you should look around you. Wherever you live, there are good men and women around you who are veterans and are very successful. Maybe your boss? Maybe HIS boss?

"during a discussion panel ... at blackhat"

[Norsefire]

Next year at Blackhat:

- Moxie Marlinspike demonstrates how to pwn an F22-Raptor has it passes your datacenter

- K Chen describes how an attacker can install malicious code into the firmware of the steering console in a M1A2

- Joshua Abraham demonstrates several flaws in secret identities used by CIA agents

- Marc Bevand disarms Russian missiles with an ATI Graphics card

- Joe Grand now gets free parking in a Black Hawk

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:Except your story doesnt really work

[koolfy]

After a great war, civilians who lost their families, houses and so are willing to build their country back, live in peace and forget about war, forever.

Germans could want a WWII, only because WWI did not affected German civilians the way WWII did, most of WWI happened outside German soil, and on France's one. People in Germany felt frustrated when their government gave up on a war civilians didn't even see with their eyes, they could not conceive a war can be lost abroad one's country, and wanted revenge to political restrictions made by the "winners" of that war they did not see they were loosing.
That's how Hitler could hit people with his hate speech, otherwise, people would have slap his face with ruins of their house shouting "didn't we suffered enough ??" ;)
Now, France and Germany are strong friends, and really not willing to get into a war again.

There is this famous french popular quote, after WWI : "Plus jamais ca." ("never again."), I think we all feel the same across the world, after a real war.

The US keeps voting YES to wars because they never had to feel bombs above their heads, nor their parents.
Though it's a terrible tragedy in human history, WTC was nothing compared to a war on one's soil.

only exceptions are people weak against religious/political/media manipulation, and that's mostly an education level problem, the US weren't at war against Afghanistan, or Irak as far as I know, they were at war with a minority of religious terrorists, a dictator, and the people the dictator had under control. I don't think intellectuals and non-manipulated civilians and farmers ever wanted a fight against world's no.1 army...

I don't know about Vietnam, but the USAÂdid a really good job helping Japan after the war, I have been told in school that US people sent in Japan after the war felt terrible about what war did to the country and did their best, for the good of Japanese people. Really.


Please if you disagree, don't mod me down : I'm young, and still have much to learn, instead reply and feed me with the facts I don't know... AC, I'm looking at you.

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:Discipline vs patriotism

[Narnie]

From my enlistment w/ the military, I found that in the wartime situation, enlisted freethinkers were the most beneficial to the military and often helped the unit the most and were most rewarded. Conversely, during the peace time, the enlisted followers/conformist were most often rewarded because they were least bored and had the least amount of issues with adhering to the regulations, SOP, and ROE. Of course, this leads to an interesting dichotomy of the enlisted ranks--those senior NCOs who demanded strict adherence to orders (because they expect conformists), and those NCOs that would let a few minor things slide if you could get shit done.

Sure, freethinkers who can conform to regulations are the ideal, but many times the junior ranks are beaten with the "conform stick" enough that the freethinkers leave the military before they advance to a rank that encourages creativity.