NSA wants to hire hackers
Wearing a t-shirt and jeans, America's top spymaster --
National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander, also the head of the
U.S. Cyber Command -- took the stage Friday at the nation's largest hacker
convention to deliver a recruiting pitch.
"In this room, this room right here, is the talent
our nation needs to secure cyberspace," Alexander told the
standing-room-only audience at DefCon, a grassroots gathering in Las Vegas
expected to draw a record 16,000 attendees this year. "We need great
talent. We don't pay as high as everybody else, but we're fun to be
around."
Alexander's appearance is a milestone for DefCon, a
hacker mecca with an often-uneasy relationship with the feds. DefCon is the
older, wilder and far less official sibling of BlackHat, a cybersecurity
conference that wrapped up Thursday in Las Vegas.
BlackHat draws corporate infosecurity workers in suits.
At DefCon, they switch to t-shirts and spend the weekend mingling with
cryptographers, script kiddies, security researchers and a liberal smattering
of military and law enforcement agents -- both in and out of uniform.
DefCon is famed as an elite hacking showcase. The
registration badges alone are a technical feat, featuring a customizable
circuit board and cryptographic scavenger-hunt puzzle. A hacker group called
Ninja Networks set up a private cellular network to chat on during the show --
a stunt that drew admiring praise from Alexander during his talk.
Those are the kinds of skills the government needs, he
said. Playing to his audience, Alexander rattled off a long list of
tech-industry stars like Vint Cerf and Dave Aitel who did pioneering work on
the federal payroll.
"We're the ones who built this Internet,"
Alexander said, citing the key role agencies like DARPA (Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency) played in the network's early days. "Now we're
the ones who have to keep it secure, and I think you folks can help do
that."
To hammer the point home, the NSA set up a special
recruiting site for the show: http://www.nsa.gov/careers/dc20/. It's not your
standard government careers page. This one includes the line: "If you have
a few, shall we say, indiscretions in your past, don't be alarmed."
The NSA is especially keen to draw in people like those
holed up in a conference room just 20 feet away from Alexander's presentation,
hunched over laptops and takeout cartons. They're competitors in Defcon's
"Capture the Flag" battle, a kind of geek Olympics.
Hacking is usually a glamorless sport, but Defcon plays
up the drama for its famed-in-nerd-circles CTF showdowns. In a darkened arena
filled with rock music and colored laser lights, 20 competing teams fight for
48 hours to break into each other's servers and steal key information, called
"flags," while holding off rival attackers. The winner will be
announced Sunday evening during DefCon's closing ceremonies.
Coders from around the globe battle through a series of
qualifying rounds to make it to the CTF. "These hackers here are the top
of the world," one observer murmured in hushed tones, watching the teams
bang feverishly on their computers a few hours after the contest's Friday
morning kickoff.
The NSA would love to learn more about the exploits those
CTF hackers are using. But do the hackers want to play ball?
The audience reaction to Alexander's talk was generally
favorable. Organizers had to turn away hundreds of attendees from the
at-capacity conference hall, and the crowd that made it in listened attentively
to the general's talk.
One attendee near the front -- a corporate security researcher
who specializes in defending against digital espionage -- said he came away
impressed. More importantly, from NSA's point of view, he says he would
consider checking out the agency's career options.
"I think it would be thrilling," said the
researcher, who asked to remain anonymous. "I mean, that's the real deal.
We're trying to protect our corporate IP. They're trying to protect the country
and people. It would be absolutely awesome -- even though the pay is
nothing."
Of course, not everyone was so easily won over. A few
rows further back, a group of cynics kept up a running counterpoint to
Alexander's talk.
"Sometimes you guys get a bad rep," Alexander
said at one point. "From my perspective, what you're doing to figure out
the vulnerabilities in our systems is absolutely needed."
"Then stop arresting us!" one of the hecklers
called back.
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