Hacker Is Not a Dirty Word

Last week I spoke at the Chicago Electronic Crimes Task Force with my friend Keith Jones. I talked about trends in digital security and Keith described his experience as an expert witness at the Duronio trial. One of the themes was the defense team's attempt to attack the credibility of Jon Tan/Karl Kasper as a forensic investigator because he is a "hacker."

I have a feeling that the "hacker is bad" defense weakened last week when Microsoft started a new blog titled Hackers @ Microsoft:

Microsoft employs some of the best hackers in the world and actively recruits them and develops them. They work on all kinds of projects, whether it be in development, research, testing, management and of course security.

I'll keep my eye on this Microsoft blog to see what sort of topics they plan to cover.