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Defense Expert: Hire Hackers and Wage War
Phoghat writes "A top defense and cybersecurity expert says the U.S. should stop trying to take aim at expert hackers and start doing a better job of recruiting them. 'Let's just say that in some places you find guys with body piercings and nonregulation haircuts,' says U.S. Naval Postgraduate School professor John Arquilla . 'But most of these sorts of guys can't be vetted in the traditional way. We need a new institutional culture that allows us to reach out to them.'"
I am guessing that culture doesn't want to be vetted, by any means, traditional or non-traditional.
Most of these hackers inherently distrust the government, that's why they are hacking them. So what is the benefit in hiring them?
The problem is that vetting the ethics of a hacker needs someone who has insight in the cultural framework as much as the technical capabilities of the person under review, and that is MILES beyond your average HR setup.
I know from my own experience that the best reviewer for tech is someone who is either a former hacker him/herself, or has a personality that borders on Aspergers. You cannot understand technical people if you do not have the required mental tools, and especially the brighter hackers do not exactly conform to the standard employee model.
So, use one to know one, and forget about your average corporate HR droid doing anywhere near a sensible assessment. Oh, and forget about standard management techniques either - not only does it take one to know one, it certainly takes one to manage them.
Insert
While we're at it, could we please also *not* assume that l33t hackers come only in one visual package (piercings, ink, etc.)?
Take highly competent tech people who are generally speaking somewhat anti-authoritarian, give them the tools to do nasty things to the nations enemies via hacking, malware programming etc, and expect them to keep their mouths shut about it. :P
A lot of people don't trust the government - and often with very good reason - why would they want to hack for it?
How long until the complete log files of everything they and everyone they associate with are sent to Wikileaks?
Find technical people who are not anti-authoritarian and get them to do your hacking - just hire them for ability and knowledge rather than the traditional military virtues that most military organizations look for. In fact, hire them as civilian contractors and then keep them away from the rest of the military
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Want to reach the hacking culture? It's like hiring tribes people to help log the Amazon rainforest. Corporations should learn from the mistakes made in those senarios before even thinking of strategies such as this.
The irony here is although the Govt started the Internet as an official project, it has always rested on the shoulders of academics and the talent of the hacking community, corporations come further down the list.
It's sorta funny to read this type of bleating in a Slashdot article that appears on the same day as one that says the Chinese government has backdoors in 80% of Telecoms to sniff information.
Look, ya dumb sheep.
They are already waging war against us, enemy and "friendly" states already use their government resources to steal intellectual property and wage industrial espionage against the United States. You obviously don't actually run any internet-facing services or you would see this shit in your logs.
The fact that our government doesn't do it aggressively too is the odd part. It's time to man up and fight back or your children (assuming you manage to breed) will be speaking Chinese and working for Russian mobsters for a daily loaf of bread.
you have to realize that many of the "cyber hackers" the government is eyeballing are the very same people that love nothing more than to leak classified data and hack into defense secrets solely because they view your establishent as the problem.
speaking as one of the the aformentioned non-regulation pierced guy, i can say that each time i hear a blowhard suit at the anything-department wax prophetic upon anything prefixed with "cyber," i roll my eyes, turn up the hardcore techno, and go back to writing that python interface for the communications receiver I bought on craigslist a few months back.
no one cares about the next war you're trying to sell america except the mouthbreathing walmartians in the sticks. the people youre trying to "reach out to" explicitly do not respond because they arent stupid enough to nod when told "be all you can be." as knowledge is power they understand enough about your institution to avoid it at all costs. all its done in the past 40 years is act as an engine of misery, destruction and sorrow across the globe.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I say it's awfully childish. Do we really want the Internet to be an unstable place?
It is far more childish to think that if we just play nice, everyone else will follow suit. The Internet will not be made secure by covering our eyes, crossing our fingers, and praying. It will only be more secure by making sure that those interested in its security have bigger "guns" than those interested in its instability.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Or by actually investing in secure technologies and practices. In real life, it's better to make sure those interested in security are well-armed because there's not much that can withstand a bazooka, but, online, it's very difficult to compromise communications encrypted with 4096-bt RSA.
tl;dr offense is easier in the real world than it is online.
I know a few nerds who are also fitness geeks but you're highly delusional if you think that most hackers fall into that category. Most of us are not fit, unhealthy, and are weird looking.
Want to reach the hacking culture? It's like hiring tribes people to help log the Amazon rainforest. Corporations should learn from the mistakes made in those senarios before even thinking of strategies such as this.
What the corporate MBAs would immediately deduce is that the tribespeople had been improperly incentivized, and should have been offered different shiny stuff. Numerous case studies would then be performed to find the optimum lowest-cost shiny stuff to offer to induce tribespeople to wreck their environment. Devastation of the rainforest would not be abated, while corporate profits and MBA bonuses would increase grotesquely for a few quarters.
Similar dysfunctional thinking would be applied to recruiting hackers.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
The clean cut guy is clearly more of a conformist, likely less hostile towards authority, and because of that potentially less likely to be a whistleblower.
More like thugs with piles of corpses of corpses in their basement, that are overshadowed only by their needy desire for approval and respect, gang up on anybody looking at them the wrong way, while robbing those they claim to protect blind. Which is exactly the opposite of what you claim it is, defending something of value. It's destroying value, and for pitiful reasons.
Bill Hicks said it best, why even bother typing when I could quote that:
Bill Fucking Hicks.
And if you think a comedian doesn't count, try just about any great mind... they more or less all agree. They either didn't write about it, or they said something to the effect of the above. Anything lower than that is just mediocre BS. People lie to themselves, so they lie to you ("you" as in "the people"), and you drag that cart all the way up the hill... in it? Banal bullshit. Trinkets and lies. Coffins are being flushed down the toilet, while show tunes play.
George Orwell.
Deadstick.