SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the security-suggestions-are-cheaper-than-implementations-will-they-pay? dept.
HP Inc. has hired some "white hat superstars":
A trio of security researcher superstars -- including a one-time legendary teen hacker known as "Mafiaboy" who brought down some of the most popular sites on the internet, and a medical researcher who exposed a security hole that led to the recall of a half-million pacemakers -- are joining an HP Security Advisory Board aimed at making advances in the war against hackers.
HP announced the new panel of white hat security superstars at the start of its Reinvent worldwide partner conference Monday as part of its ongoing effort to deliver what it calls the most secure PCs and printers on the market. The members of the new board are chartered with providing "strategic input to HP's leadership team and security experts.
The three security superstars, who will receive honorariums for their service, include:
Michael Calce, who received the moniker "Mafiaboy" when as a 15-year-old in 2000 he shut down eBay, Yahoo and ETrade and others with a series of attacks. Calce – the chairman of the HP Security Advisory Board -- is now a white hat hacker who does penetration testing for companies.
Justine Bone, CEO of MedSec, whose firm exposed a security hole that led to the recall just last month by the U.S Food and Drug Administration of 496,000 pacemakers from Abbott, which has issued a firmware update. Bone is a controversial figure given her decision to proactively expose medical threats.
Robert Masse, who has been helping businesses stop security breaches as a strategic consultant for 20 years. Masse – who owned his own security consulting business – has agreed to donate his honorarium to charity and is participating separately from his duties as a partner for Deloitte Canada.
[...] The board is not a symbolic gesture but rather a real-world panel to help HP create more secure products, said Calce. "There is no smoke and mirrors here," he said. "The members I assembled are to offer the best advice and input that we possibly can for HP to really develop the most secure products that will impact the world and negate what is going on in terms of hacking worldwide."
Will this HP Security Advisory Board reinvent corporate computer security?
This isn't MafiaBoy's first involvement with HP. Previous articles.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 12 2017, @01:20PM
I'm wondering how HP employees feel about this. Seems to me that it would be a morale killer -- after all, the ethical programmers within HP have probably been (for the most part) trying to do a good job while having to deal with the usual MBA bs...cutting budgets and lowering priority for anything that keeps the product from shipping. This would never have been a problem in the old HP, the company that built rock solid test equipment--those managers understood what it took to make a quality product.
And now some outsiders are going to get all the glory for saying the obvious.
If this new "Security Advisory Board" really wants to improve things, they will start by interviewing hard working lower level programmers. Find out first hand about the management changes needed to improve their ability to get things right the first time. But it's too late for this, for the current HP culture (imh AC o).