7 Hackers Who Got Legit Jobs From Their Misdeeds 123
adeelarshad82 writes "Just like in Stephen Glass' fabricated feature where a lonely teenage hacker gets hired by a major software company, the 21 year old PlayStation 3 hacker, George "Geohot" Hotz, was offered a job at Facebook. Ironically Hotz wasn't the first school-aged hacker to be rewarded for his cyber-crime rather than a prison sentence. Turns out there are others who have managed (with one exception) to avoid jail time, and instead found themselves gainfully employed by some of Silicon Valley's most exclusive circles."
KEVIN MITNICK! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Meh (Score:5, Informative)
Neither are most of the others in the slide show. The one guy who actually did to jail time actually did something quite illegal. Figuring out how to pair your Wii mote via bluetooth, not so much.
Peter Hajas is the creator of uber-popular iOS jailbreak app MobileNotifier, a notification system that resembles Google Android’s in that it seamlessly layers and stacks your mobile notifications on top of running apps
Johnny Chung Lee is more of a modder than a hacker (which some would argue is just a matter of shades of grey). Lee is a computer scientist who famously hacked a Nintendo Wiimote in 2008 using a few ballpoint pens and infrared lights. He was then hired by Microsoft to develop the Kinect.
Jeff Moss is the founder of the Black Hat and DEF CON computer hacker conferences, but back in the pre-bubble 1980s he ran underground bulletin board systems for hackers.
During his early college years at Georgia Southern University, Chris Putnam and his friends created an XSS-based worm on Facebook and modified infected pages to look just like MySpace profiles.
In 2009, a then 21-year-old Australian named Ashley Towns stayed up late one night downloading iOS app development programs, and unwittingly created the first known iPhone worm. The virus automatically set a photo of singer Rick Astley’s face as your mobile wallpaper, possibly the ultimate "Rickroll."
Also in 2009, a 17-year-old high school student from Brooklyn named Michael “Mikeyy" Mooney coded a Twitter worm that sent tweets from hundreds of accounts, mostly with links to a spam website or Mooney’s phone number. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone likened Mooney’s worm to the Samy worm that hit MySpace in 2005 and vowed to press charges.
Kevin Poulsen hacked into L.A.’s KIIS-FM radio station to rig a competition that eventually scored him a Porsche. He followed up with breaches into FBI computers. Naturally this put the federal agency in hot pursuit of the black hat hacker. He was arrested in 1991 and served five years in prison in addition to paying a $56,000 fine for charges of mail, wire, and computer fraud. Upon serving his sentence, Poulsen became a journalist, and is now a senior editor at Wired magazine. One of his most notable achievements was creating a program that identified hundreds of sex offenders on MySpace.
Exceptions to the rule. (Score:2, Informative)
For every "geoHot" out there there are 40,000 of them getting ass raped in prison. Remember kids, "street cred" is romantic, but doing it anonymously and covering your ass and tracks protects you from the unwanted sodomy of the legal system. Be paranoid. IF you want that lifestyle you have to be paranoid and assume that anyone you know will rat on you. Look at Adrian Lame-o he happily ratted on anyone and everyone to save his own ass. your "buddies" will do it to you if they get the chance.
A friendly reminder from an "old hat". Kids today have the skillz but they utterly suck at hiding.
Only 2 or 3 are actually black hats (Score:4, Informative)
George Hotz - Benevolent tinkerer
Peter Hajas - Benevolent tinkerer
Johnny Chung Lee - Benevolent tinkerer
Jeff Moss - Benevolent
Jeff Putnam - Created destructive Facebook virus - Black hat
Ashley Towns - Created harmless prank virus - Benevolent
Michael Mooney - Created spamming twitter worm - Black hat
Kevin Poulsen - Rigged a competition to give himself a car - Could be considered a black hat