The Obama administration is embracing the dark side to help it fight cyberattacks.
On Friday, a well-known hacker was one of 16 people named to the Department of Homeland Security’s Advisory Council (HSAC).
Jeff Moss, aka “Dark Tangent,” started out as a high-school “phone phreak” making free long-distance calls and later founded the DefCon and Black Hat hackers’ conferences.
He’s since worked in information security for accounting giant Ernst & Young, and now is a consultant testing corporations’ cybersecurity.
But he told Wired News and Cnet News he was genuinely surprised to be asked to join a government law-enforcement body.
“I always figured that because of my associations in the past that I would be kind of out of the running for anything like this,” he told Wired News. [Via Fox News]
I think it’s great that the Administration is going to add someone who knows the inner workings of the “hacking underground” as Fox News calls it. Who better to help with cyber security, than someone who is capable of actually hacking, and is not just working in “theory.”
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