7 Hackers Who Got Legit Jobs From Their Misdeeds

adeelarshad82 writes "Just like in Stephen Glass' fabricated feature where a lonely teenage hacker gets hired by a major software company, the 21 year old PlayStation 3 hacker, George "Geohot" Hotz, was offered a job at Facebook. Ironically Hotz wasn't the first school-aged hacker to be rewarded for his cyber-crime rather than a prison sentence. Turns out there are others who have managed (with one exception) to avoid jail time, and instead found themselves gainfully employed by some of Silicon Valley's most exclusive circles."

Comments

Meh

[dexomn]

GeoHot != Criminal

Re:Meh

[0100010001010011]

Neither are most of the others in the slide show. The one guy who actually did to jail time actually did something quite illegal. Figuring out how to pair your Wii mote via bluetooth, not so much.

Peter Hajas is the creator of uber-popular iOS jailbreak app MobileNotifier, a notification system that resembles Google Android’s in that it seamlessly layers and stacks your mobile notifications on top of running apps

Johnny Chung Lee is more of a modder than a hacker (which some would argue is just a matter of shades of grey). Lee is a computer scientist who famously hacked a Nintendo Wiimote in 2008 using a few ballpoint pens and infrared lights. He was then hired by Microsoft to develop the Kinect.

Jeff Moss is the founder of the Black Hat and DEF CON computer hacker conferences, but back in the pre-bubble 1980s he ran underground bulletin board systems for hackers.

During his early college years at Georgia Southern University, Chris Putnam and his friends created an XSS-based worm on Facebook and modified infected pages to look just like MySpace profiles.

In 2009, a then 21-year-old Australian named Ashley Towns stayed up late one night downloading iOS app development programs, and unwittingly created the first known iPhone worm. The virus automatically set a photo of singer Rick Astley’s face as your mobile wallpaper, possibly the ultimate "Rickroll."

Also in 2009, a 17-year-old high school student from Brooklyn named Michael “Mikeyy" Mooney coded a Twitter worm that sent tweets from hundreds of accounts, mostly with links to a spam website or Mooney’s phone number. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone likened Mooney’s worm to the Samy worm that hit MySpace in 2005 and vowed to press charges.

Kevin Poulsen hacked into L.A.’s KIIS-FM radio station to rig a competition that eventually scored him a Porsche. He followed up with breaches into FBI computers. Naturally this put the federal agency in hot pursuit of the black hat hacker. He was arrested in 1991 and served five years in prison in addition to paying a $56,000 fine for charges of mail, wire, and computer fraud. Upon serving his sentence, Poulsen became a journalist, and is now a senior editor at Wired magazine. One of his most notable achievements was creating a program that identified hundreds of sex offenders on MySpace.

Re:Meh

[luis_a_espinal]

If we had competent courts rather than a mockery of a court system run by corrupt "lawyers" and bribed/senile judges, those provisions would long ago have been declared unconscionable and therefore unenforceable anyways, much like "non-compete clauses" have routinely been found unconscionable.

Emotional-driven generalization != truth.

KEVIN MITNICK!

[hashish16]

Come most you should remember the "Free Kevin Mitnick" campaign. He is the original hacker/cracker turned "consultant".

What crime? What misdeeds?

[jjo]

Geohot didn't do anything illegal, so why is he a 'criminal'? How is restoring the Linux functionality that Sony originally sold, and then disabled though updates, a 'misdeed'?

Hotz isn't just some script kiddie

[elrous0]

This wasn't the case of some phone-phreaker or wardriver getting hired. Hotz was an actual skilled hacker, with some pretty serious reverse-engineering and programming abilities. He wasn't just some asshole who figured out a password or slightly modified some virus code.

Only 2 or 3 are actually black hats

[GameboyRMH]

George Hotz - Benevolent tinkerer
Peter Hajas - Benevolent tinkerer
Johnny Chung Lee - Benevolent tinkerer
Jeff Moss - Benevolent
Jeff Putnam - Created destructive Facebook virus - Black hat
Ashley Towns - Created harmless prank virus - Benevolent
Michael Mooney - Created spamming twitter worm - Black hat
Kevin Poulsen - Rigged a competition to give himself a car - Could be considered a black hat