When Hackers Become the Good Guys

At DefCon III in 1995, the young crowd of 470 spent their time jamming a local radio station broadcast and playing Hacker Jeopardy at midnight when they couldn't drink at the bar. "Free Kevin" stickers were plastered everywhere protesting the jailing of fugitive hacker Kevin Mitnick, and a 14-year-old ran away from home to attend the event. (I know because I was there.)

At DefCon 19 this year, plenty of the nearly 12,000 attendees had gray hair, most work as security professionals, and some even brought their children. Mitnick was there signing copies of his latest book, "Ghost in the Wires," and posing for photographs, before appearing as a guest on "The Colbert Report" last week.

A community is growing and growing up.

In the early years, DefCon founder Jeff Moss used to say "if you're 20 and you're working for The Man, you're a loser," Richard Thieme, author of "Mind Games" and a professional speaker, recounted in his DefCon talk this year and in an interview with CNET afterward. "Ten years ago, Moss said 'if you're 30 and you're not working for The Man, you're a loser.' And now he agreed that at 40 he is The Man.'"

Moss, aka "Dark Tangent," started DefCon in 1993 as a farewell party to a buddy, only to have it become the world's largest hacker conference. He sold off the more commercial Black Hat security conference, which frees him up for public service--he serves on the Homeland Security Advisory Council and was named the chief security officerfor the non-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) earlier this year.

Another hacker role model who is having a very direct impact on U.S. cyber security policies and funding is Peiter Zatko, who was better known as "Mudge" when he was a member of The Cult of the Dead Cow (CDC) and L0pht hacker groups in the 1990s. He presented at a session on password cracking and holes in Microsoft software at DefCon in 1996. This year, he gave a keynote talk at Black Hat about his plans as program manager for the information innovation office at the Defense Department's DARPA (Defense Advances Research Projects Agency) to fund hacker spaces and small security start-ups.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20095649-245/when-hackers-become-the-man/#ixzz1WVPoCjyq