US gov't building hacker army for cyber war

http://news.yahoo.com/us-govt-building-hacker-army-cyber-war-171003963.html

The US National Security Agency hopes to hire a mass of “cyber warriors” this year, and another large group next year, to help the country fight the increasingly intense international cyber war, reports Reuters.

To find new recruits, representatives from the NSA, Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security and NASA, will be attending the annual DEF CON hacker conference in Las Vegas, which takes place this weekend.

Started in 1993 by hacker Jeff Moss (aka Dark Tangent), DEF CON is the preeminent meet-up for US hackers. The four-day conference costs $150 — in cash only — to attend. There is no registration, no credit cards allowed, which keeps everything anonymous. About 10,000 computer savvy individuals are expected to attend this year’s conference.

The NSA spy agency hopes to find skilled individuals willing to help the United States conduct itself — both defensively and offensively — in the growing global cyber war, which is gaining combatants and victims more and more each day. (Sources who attended last year’s DEF CON tell us that members of the US nation security complex were also in attendance then, as well, with similar recruiting goals.)

Hacker groups like LulzSec and Anonymous are running amok over the websites of corporations, and stealing classified documents from high-level trans-governmental organizations like NATO and the International Monetary Fund. More nefarious digital underground players — people like government-sponsored hackers from countries in eastern Europe, Russia, Iran and China — have allegedly breached some of the most sensitive systems in the US, like the Pentagon. It is to fight these enemies that the NSA and other US security agencies hope to build a hacker army.

 Problem, reaction, solution.