Hacker Gets a Leading DARPA JobFebruary 17, 2010

 

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has selected a respected hacker to oversee funding for its cyber defense projects, according to a report at CNET News.com.

Peiter Zatko, who burst onto the security scene in the 1980s as a teenage hacker, will be a program manager within the Strategic Technologies Office and will focus on cyber security. He plans to fund researchers in the hacker space and at boutique start-ups — places he believes have a better chance than large corporations of best developing technology to defend American interests in the digital space.

"I want revolutionary changes. I don't want evolutionary ones," he told News.com in an interview. He said that the current defensive paradigm is to respond to attacks rather than having a mechanism to block attacks — a sign that the current technology is not working adequately for commercial or government networks.

Zatko is known for inventing new technologies that have helped stem the tide of attacks. In the 1990s, he ran the groundbreaking L0pht hacker space where he invented a way to detect whether attackers were probing a network. This "anti-sniffing technology" was the first detector used by the Defense Department. Zatko also led the way on "buffer overflows," one of the main ways computer networks are attacked.

He has recently been helping the government navigate the cyber defense space, including as a member of the President's Information Assurance sub-committee and as a subcommittee member to the Partnership for Critical Infrastructure Protection. He has also testified before Congressional committees. Zatko said he decided to take the DARPA job is because the agency's new director, Regina Dugan, is entrepreneurial and is looking to engage more with academics, according to News.com. This comes after years of DARPA being closed to nongovernmental researchers for national security reasons.

"Now they are running more programs out of DARPA that are not classified beyond what they need to be, so it will enable more people to have visibility into them," he told News.com. He also said that the market drives private companies to sell products that must be upgraded often to make more profit. "You don't want to put yourself out of business. But now, I want to put myself out of business."