7 Black Hat Hackers Who Landed Legit Jobs! 1. Robert Tappan Morris Morris is best known for creating the first Internet worm, the Morris Worm, in 1988. Later, he co-founded an online store, Viaweb, with Paul Graham, who later found startup incubator Y Combinator. Viaweb was one of the first web-based computer applications. Now, Morris teaches computer science at MIT. 2. Owen Thor Walker Also known as akill, Walker was charged as (and admitted to) being the ringleader of an international hacking group that caused nearly $26 million of damage. In 2008, he was hired by TelstraClear, the New Zealand subsidiary of Australian telecommunications company Telstra, to work with its security division, DMZGlobal. 3. Michael Mooney Mooney is best known for creating the Twitter bug Mikeyy, a worm designed to showcase Twitters security vulnerabilities. While the exploit was more gray than black hat, the worm could have gotten Mooney into serious legal trouble. However, Twitter didnt press charges, and the 17-year-old Mooney was offered jobs by two software development firms. The teen accepted a position at web app shop exqSoft Solutions. 4. Ashley Towns Towns created the first-ever iPhone worm, a rickrolling bit of code that only affected jailbroken iPhones. Mere weeks after the worm started spreading, Towns was hired by mogeneration, a company that develops iPhone apps, mostly for other clients such as TrueLocal, FoodWatch and Xumii. 5. Call of Duty Hacker A 14-year-old Dublin schoolboy hacked into the Microsoft Xbox system this spring. In stark contrast to how Sony handled PlayStation hackers like geohot, Microsoft decided to work with the kid instead. The company hopes to teach the indubitably talented hacker to use his skills for legitimate purposes. 6. Christopher Tarnovsky Hardware hacker began his journey repairing satellites for the U.S. Army. He started dabbling in illegal hacking in the late 1990s. However, he didnt get into serious legal trouble until he was hired by Rupert Murdochs News Corp. to hack a rival companys satellite TV chip. These days, Tarnovsky runs a hardware security firm and sticks to gray hat hacking, like proving Infineons unhackable chip was anything but in 2010. 7. Jeff Moss Moss is the founder of the Black Hat and DEF CON computer hacker conferences. In the days before the Internet was a big thing, he ran BBSes for hacking and phreaking and provided a hub for a huge, underground network of hackers of all stripes, from the curious to the criminal. In 2009, he was was sworn into the U.S. Homeland Security Advisory Council. And in April 2011, Moss was named chief security officer for ICANN, the agency that oversees the Internets domain names.
Posted on: Wed, 27 Nov 2013 18:41:45 +0000
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