from Hacker News

US Defense contractors recruiting offensive attackers by the hundreds

by mikkohypponen on 6/15/12, 4:47 PM with 10 comments

  • by mtgx on 6/15/12, 5:20 PM

    This has confirmed all my worries. Whenever the intelligence agencies and the politicians lobby for "cyber-bills" and such, and it's almost never about "protecting US against threats", but about "attacking others".

    So on one hand they keep drumming up the fear mongering about other countries attacking us through "cyberspace" and that they need "these bills" to stop that, when in fact the bills, and the bigger budgets, are all about US attacking others, and basically committing acts of war against them (their words, not mine).

    If the US is really afraid of "cyber-threats", then they really need to ramp up the defense at home, not offense, and keep as much of the critical infrastructure off the Internet as possible.

    Oh, and these are a couple of funny posts about the politicians' abuse of the word "cyber":

    http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120614/01590919314/cyberp...

    http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120615/03214619333/politi...

  • by pilom on 6/15/12, 6:04 PM

    I work for one of the companies listed in this article as a "Cyber Security Engineer." I have 2 issues with this article. First, the vast majority of cyber security work is defence. I would guess the percentage of people working defence is 100x more than the number of people working offence. (And yet the people on offence always have the upper hand, but that is a different story.) Second, most of the hiring for offensive talent is at the Speculation phase. NSA doesn't really outsource much of its work on this kind of stuff. The contractors know that the demand will eventually ramp up but it hasn't yet. So most offensive guys at contractors spend their time doing Internal R&D to use as demos for the government. Some day NSA will ask for help, but it isn't today. When it does though the contractors are trying to be ready.

  • by AJ007 on 6/15/12, 7:23 PM

    Unlike a standing army, the US could conceivably have a majority of the world's skilled hackers and crackers on their payroll (directly or indirectly.)

    It also makes for good record keeping by "interviewing" talent.