Is that not also true of itch and GOG?
520
joined 1 year ago
Check out System76. Linux compatible laptops are their specialty.
Yea, but the nerds that the suits put in charge of security will absolutely recognize this kids skills.
They will also recognise how much of a potential threat he is.
The suits don’t run the security teams at most corpos.
The suits absolutely do run the security teams. Very indirectly, but they do. The suits are the ones security teams have to persuade to get any sort of funding and they can and will veto a hiring decision like this.
You are correct that in most places, the suits do not usually directly intervene. Usually there is a lead guy in the security team that handles the conversations with the suits.
In a well functioning security unit, there is some trust there but not nearly enough to hire a kid like this. A veto is seen as a politically risky manoeuvre for a suit but it would absolutely be pulled for the prospect of hiring this kid, with some frankly compelling justification that any team lead would find nearly impossible to get around.
I've worked in several corporations in several security teams in the past, some amazing, some god-awful with insane suit meddling.
This wasn't carelessness. This was a deliberate.
Mostly true in normal cases. If you’re really talented there is a market for you, always.
In this case, that market is the black market. In the regular market, no head of security wants to be responsible for a potential critical breach by hiring such a wild cannon.
His only possible path would have been to show remorse after the attacks. He shot that in the ass, or at least made his job much harder in that respect, by pulling another attack while in police custody.
It could be something as simple as needing to feel powerful in their space. That's something a lot of people, autistic or not, can fall prey to, but it is more prevalent in introverts without a wide range of healthy social circles.
Think about it, how ballsy do you have to be to do an attack while in police custody? You pull that off, you're going down as a fucking legend in black hat circles.
Like I get it, the guy's got talent, and he stuck it to the man...
Except what he's actually done is leaked decades of hard work by many talented people that do deserve to see a return on their efforts.
You can point to wages and working conditions but shit like this don't solve those problems
Not every black hat, even autistic ones, lack an understanding of their actions. Some know perfectly fucking well what they are doing.
This guy rigged up hardware to pull off a massive attack while in police custody. Bro knew full well by that point what the consequences were, he pulled off another attack in the middle of dealing with said consequences
Almost all blackhats are part of a group, and even social engineering tactics can require talent to pull off, especially when it is guarding billions of dollars worth of trade secrets.
The dude carried out an attack with a fucking Amazon Fire stick and a phone. While in police custody. That is an insane level of preparation and knowledge of your tools
To be fair to those two:
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Mitnick did much what he did before hacking was even a crime, and almost all of it before offensive cybersecurity was even a viable career option.
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the damage caused by the entirety of ShadowCrew (4000 odd members) was a drop in the bucket compared to that caused by this single kid
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neither of them had compulsion issues that would cause them to attempt to hack even while under surveillance.
They aren't talking about his autism. They're talking about his compulsion to do these acts. People, even autistics, don't go as far as he did to hack things while already under surveillance. That isn't an autism thing, something else is there.
You can do the same with the Steam installation files for games that do not have DRM - those that do wouldn't appear in Itch or GOG in the first place.