Just the Hackers You Need

[tabatha]

This is good for security of voting, financial transactions, viruses, etc. Somehow, though, there needs to be a way to do what WikiLeaks has shown is necessary --- transparency.

Every millisecond, the billions of people across the globe who rely on the Internet for information and email for communication are assaulted by an unknown number of constantly evolving criminals. They prey upon our technological stupidity to take over bank accounts, sell us fake products that never arrive, and otherwise extract money from our wallets in creatively devious ways. It is nothing short of the biggest crime wave in human history, but, as individuals, we have very little to use to defend ourselves, save not opening suspicious emails, avoiding weird Web sites, and keeping our computer software up to date.

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Debra Bowen, California’s Secretary of State, hired UCSB and others to test the hackability of the state’s electronic voting machines in 2007. She said the group’s work “is felt by every California voter, each election cycle. … The work carried out by the top-to-bottom reviewers strengthened voting system security requirements in the state, and ultimately across the nation, since many states piggybacked on the work done in California.”

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So Vigna includes a strong ethics component in his curriculum and gives the constant reminder that the bad guys ultimately get caught and go to jail. During the class I sat in on, for instance, he revealed a new hacking tool available for Firefox that lets users take over accounts of anyone using Gmail or Facebook on their network, but then warned in a serious tone, “If you run this, you are committing a felony.”

http://www.independent.com/news/2010/dec/16/just-hackers-you-need/