You want cyber security hire a top notch hacker

I use to tell software and web clients who where concerned about their security to head over to the nearest high school and start asking around for the best hacker in the school – then hire them to break your stuff. It doesn’t matter how good of a developer you are, web or desktop, you will always miss stuff and in most cases you are the worst one’s to try and bust the security of your own systems.

Well it seems that the US government is taking the same kind of advise to heart. After all if you want to make sure your networks are safe hiring the best of those who can slice through even the so-called toughest security like a knife through butter only makes sense. So the hiring of Jeff Moss, aka Dark Tangent, the founder of the Black Hat and Defcon security conferences makes total sense.

According to a post by Elinor Mills of cnet’s Security blog Moss was genuinely humbled by the offer

Moss, who is genuinely humble, said he was “fantastically honored and excited to contribute” to the HSAC and not concerned with losing any street cred among what some would call his fan base. He did concede that his new position would give him an unfair advantage in Defcon’s “Spot The Fed” contest in which people win prizes for successfully outing undercover government agents.

Not everyone though thought as highly of Moss’ swearing in today

Moss “is a great crowd pleaser” and “he’s just bad enough for them to say ‘we’re crossing the ranks,'” said journalist and threat analyst Adrian Lamo, who served two years of probation for breaking into computer networks. “But the reality is he’s as corporate as hiring someone out of Microsoft.”