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Pentagon looking for good hackers

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CIOL Bureau
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Casino operators were on edge this week in the city that never sleeps, as

5,000 of the world’s premier computer hackers gathered in Las Vegas for their

annual Def Con 8.0 convention. In a most unusual move, a top Pentagon official

invited hackers to trade in their cyber-vandal life for a career defending the

United States against foreign computer hacker attacks.

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"I invite you to join the government, or private industry for that

matter," said US Assistant Secretary of Defense and the Pentagon's chief

information officer with responsibility for command, control, communications and

intelligence, Art Money. "If you are thinking about what you want to do the

rest of your life, then maybe you want to come work with us," he said.

Until this year, the Def Con event had been largely an underground gathering

of hackers sharing techniques and experiences. But the appearance of a top

Pentagon official makes it clear that the US is actively seeking to fight

hackers with better hackers and is willing to take a considerable risk in

employing these rogue characters.

The Pentagon has been a popular target for hackers with many of its

facilities compromised in the past several years. In addition to beefing up its

own anti-hacker defenses, the Pentagon is also eager to put hackers to work in

preventing attacks on the US as well as developing ways to remote attack enemy

computers during armed conflicts.

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Def Con founder and organizer Jeff Moss said he supported the efforts by the

Pentagon and private industry to employ hackers. "Corporate America is

interested in this stuff. There are a lot of hackers just sitting on the fence.

Sooner or later you understand there's a limited life span to doing this

stuff," said Moss, who himself started out as a teenage hacker breaking

into phone systems and university computers but later became a consultant for

Secure Computing, a major computer security firm.

As during the previous seven Def Con events, this year’s conference

features plenty of seminars on hacking techniques with topics such as cloaking

one's identity and network "lock-picking", a technique for breaking

into virtually every major software system available, including residential,

corporate and government networks.

Internet security and the vulnerability of individuals, businesses,

government and even military computers to attack has become a daily topic of

media coverage worldwide.

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