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Inside a darkened conference room in the Miami Beach Holiday Inn, America’s most badass hackers are going to war – working their laptops between swigs of Bawls energy drink as Bassnectar booms in the background. A black guy with a soul patch crashes a power grid in North Korea. A stocky jock beside him storms a database of stolen credit cards in Russia. And a gangly geek in a black T-shirt busts into the Chinese Ministry of Information, represented by a glowing red star on his laptop screen. “Is the data secured?” his buddy asks him. “No,” he replies with a grin. They’re in.
Fortunately for the enemies, however, the attacks aren’t real. They’re part of a war game at HackMiami, a weekend gathering of underground hackers in South Beach. While meatheads and models jog obliviously outside, 150 code warriors hunker inside the hotel for a three-day bender of booze, break-ins and brainstorming. Some are felons. Some are con artists. But they’re all here for the same mission: to show off their skills and perhaps attract the attention of government and corporate recruiters. Scouts are here looking for a new breed of soldier to win the war raging in the online shadows. This explains the balding guy prowling the room with an “I’m Hiring Security Engineers. Interested?” button pinned to his polo shirt.
Hackers like these aren’t the outlaws of the Internet anymore. A 29-year-old who goes by the name th3_e5c@p15t says he’s ready to fight the good fight against the real-life bad guys. “If they topple our government, it could have disastrous results,” he says. “We’d be the front line, and the future of warfare would be us.”
After decades of seeming like a sci-fi fantasy, the cyberwar is on. China, Iran and other countries reportedly have armies of state-sponsored hackers infiltrating our critical infrastructure. The threats are the stuff of a Michael Bay blockbuster: downed power grids, derailed trains, nuclear meltdowns. Or, as then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta put it last year, a “cyber-Pearl Harbor... an attack that would cause physical destruction and the loss of life, paralyze and shock the nation and create a profound new sense of vulnerability.” In his 2013 State of the Union address, President Obama said that “America must also face the rapidly growing threat from cyberattacks.…We cannot look back years from now and wonder why we did nothing in the face of real threats to our security and our economy.”
Fortunately for the enemies, however, the attacks aren’t real. They’re part of a war game at HackMiami, a weekend gathering of underground hackers in South Beach. While meatheads and models jog obliviously outside, 150 code warriors hunker inside the hotel for a three-day bender of booze, break-ins and brainstorming. Some are felons. Some are con artists. But they’re all here for the same mission: to show off their skills and perhaps attract the attention of government and corporate recruiters. Scouts are here looking for a new breed of soldier to win the war raging in the online shadows. This explains the balding guy prowling the room with an “I’m Hiring Security Engineers. Interested?” button pinned to his polo shirt.
Hackers like these aren’t the outlaws of the Internet anymore. A 29-year-old who goes by the name th3_e5c@p15t says he’s ready to fight the good fight against the real-life bad guys. “If they topple our government, it could have disastrous results,” he says. “We’d be the front line, and the future of warfare would be us.”
After decades of seeming like a sci-fi fantasy, the cyberwar is on. China, Iran and other countries reportedly have armies of state-sponsored hackers infiltrating our critical infrastructure. The threats are the stuff of a Michael Bay blockbuster: downed power grids, derailed trains, nuclear meltdowns. Or, as then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta put it last year, a “cyber-Pearl Harbor... an attack that would cause physical destruction and the loss of life, paralyze and shock the nation and create a profound new sense of vulnerability.” In his 2013 State of the Union address, President Obama said that “America must also face the rapidly growing threat from cyberattacks.…We cannot look back years from now and wonder why we did nothing in the face of real threats to our security and our economy.”
The Geeks on the Front Lines
Inside a darkened conference room in the Miami Beach Holiday Inn, America’s most badass hackers are going to war – working their laptops between swigs of Bawls energy drinks as Bassnectar booms in the background. A black guy with a soul patch crashes a power grid in North Korea. A stocky jock...
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