What I Learned at Hacker Camp

BusinessWeek on April 03, 2006

This is an entertaining and somewhat frightening story about the writer's stay at "hacker camp," a week-long intensive study in hacking techniques put on 24 times per year by TechTrain. Until a few years ago, companies would hire hackers in order to learn the latest methods the bad guys were using to beat their defenses. Now, it is considered more prudent to develop talent internally. While some of these "white hats" do defect to the dark side, they are considered better risks than those who were breaking the rules to begin with. It's frightening that the writer, who is not a computer geek, could master some of these hacking techniques without much problem. Another cause for alarm is that these tricks often work because IT staffs are lax and, for instance, don’t perform such rudimentary tasks as changing default passwords. The hackers are changing from "activists" who try to defeat systems for political or related reasons to guys trying to make a buck.