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.
"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.
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.