Hacker 'Mudge' will help DARPA to deal with cybersecurity attacks

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is wasting no time in dealing with the cybersecurity attacks facing government. It just hired Peiter Zatko, a respected hacker known as "Mudge,"to be a project manager at DARPA, where he will be in charge of funding research designed to help give the U.S. government tools needed to protect against cyberattacks.

Cnet.com broke the story about Zatko and the remarkable path that DARPA is taking into the den of the enemy to find a path to security. Zaiko will be a program manager beginning in mid-March within the Strategic Technologies Office, the Department of Defense's research and development office.

"I want revolutionary changes. I don't want evolutionary ones," he said.

One of his main goals will be to fund researchers at hacker spaces, start-ups, and boutiques that are most likely to develop cutting edge technologies. Zatko was a teen hacker in the 1980s and managed to avoid prosecution. In the 1990s, he invented anti-sniffing technology that became the first remote promiscuous system detector used by the Defense Department.

He's worked for the government in the past, as well. He was appointed to the Information Assurance sub-committee out of the Executive Office of the President, named as a subcommittee member to the Partnership for Critical Infrastructure Protection and testified several times before Congress.

For more on the hacker hired by DARPA:
- check out this cnet.com article

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