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Former LulzSec Hacker Gets a Job As Security Adviser At Big UK Firm (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Mustafa Al-Bassam, co-founder and former member of LulzSec under the alias tFlow, has announced he'll be joining Secure Trading, a UK-based online payments firm, assuming the role of security adviser. He'll be consulting the company on various ways to secure their upcoming blockchain-based payments system. The announcement comes two days after another hacker (GhostShell) revealed his true identity, just so he could get prosecuted, get it over with, and move on with his life by getting a legitimate job in the security industry.
Yep. Yet another sign that things aren't right when it comes to tech jobs. We have massive diversity problems because of asshole managers who demand that workers have zero personal life and 24/7/365 availability, driving women out of the industry.
Those of us who did what we were told, didn't go blackhat with our skills, and didn't try to rock the boat hoping we'd get ahead didn't. Hell, a lot of us here have stories about being harassed, railroaded, and either threatened with criminal prosecution or actually prosecuted by our middle schools and high schools.
Our jobs are getting shipped overseas with H1B visas all the while companies can't figure out either telecommuting or opening branch offices in places with lower costs of living. Meanwhile, hiring managers can't be arsed to even figure out what the fuck it is we do for and can offer to an organization, chalking it up to magic that's somehow just socially below them but intellectually above them and expecting to find people with 10 years experience with Visual Basic 2015 when what they really fucking need is somebody who's been a dot net developer since dot net 1.0 who writes code in a non-brain damaged dialect like C#--it all compiles to the same fucking MSIL.
Oh, but if you're a rock star like Mustafa Al-Bassam here, they'll roll out the red carpet!
Takeaway: if you want to go into tech to make a living, go blackhat. Get creative. Maybe hack some bank accounts. Steal bitcoins. Steal user credentials. Sell credit card numbers on the black market. Cause grief for megacorps. Build botnets and DDOS websites until the owner pays up. Send out trojans that encrypt and hold user data hostage for a modest sum of bitcoins, usually worth less than the data is worth were it to be destroyed. I hear a lot of these data ransom scams actually have good customer service! See, you can even work on your people skills as a blackhat!
Maybe make a load of cash this way, waaay more than you'll make for shit per hour/year. Then when you're ready to get a normal job and are tired of dodging the authorities, just publicly dox yourself, serve a token sentence, and get hired for god knows how much!
Whiskey tango foxtrot?!
Roosevelt committed crimes against the economy and against the American people, and got away with it. There's quite a backlog when it comes to politics, Bush is minor leagues at best in that list.
lucm, indeed.
That's sort of like saying we can't hold a murderer accountable because Bush started a war that got more people killed.
Of course we can. These kids fucked up. Now, if there is a punishment, it should certainly fit the crime, to be sure. 20 years in prison doesn't seem like it would be fair, but it shouldn't be a slap on the hand either.
I am definitely a little iffy on people hiring "retired" black hat hackers for their Red Team, if only because that tends to encourage hackers to black hat as a career path. When serving time is simply considered your stepping stone to a better non-criminal job, there's something wrong going on.
Note, he's not doing it to atone or because he cares if he screwed anyone. He's doing it so he can take credit so everyone knows he's a well-known hacker. Which then *improves* his resume. Would Bush admitting that he ran an impressive scam to start a war mean that he'd get kudos and a job offer because he clearly knows how to get things done? I wouldn't think so.