The notorious Gary McKinnon has stopped his mischief and is looking for an honest job. With a track record like that, he probably won't be unemployed for long.
To many people, the name Gary McKinnon doesn't mean much. And yet in the US, there are many who have lost many sleepless nights because of him. In 2002, McKinnon managed to infiltrate the networks of services such as the Pentagon and NASA, an achievement that was described by many as the cybercrime of the century. However, the Americans hunted him down and tracked him down, demanding that the United Kingdom extradite him to their country to stand trial – if he was found guilty, he risked several decades in prison.
McKinnon eventually managed to evade extradition by any means necessary – some even threatening to commit suicide if he was forced onto the plane. Many US officials and tech figures have criticized the US government for its stance, arguing that it had much more to gain by offering McKinnon the chance to work with the government to help improve its network security.
Today, a few years later, the 48-year-old Scot has his own company based in the United Kingdom. Small SEO deals with SEO issues, as its name suggests, with McKinnon charging £40 an hour for his services with a guarantee of the first page of Google results. The issue, of course, is not McKinnon's professional orientation, but rather the fact that the US missed the only opportunity to take on the man who managed to "debase" every protection measure in top-secret networks such as those of NASA and the Pentagon. Going against their own philosophy that dictates that "what you can't earn, buy", the US kicked a golden opportunity.
Moreover, it is not uncommon for hackers to be hired by large companies, even if they have been proven to have committed a crime. The charges are dropped and they suddenly find themselves on the payroll of a giant, on the opposite side of where they started. One could argue that a "hit" is an "investment" for a hacker, since this can pique the interest of large companies and convince them to work with them.
There are many examples: from Peter Hajas, the man who created the MobileNotifier application (iPhone jailbreak) and was later hired by Apple, and Kevin Poulsen, who after first "teasing" the results of a contest by winning a Porsche, hacked into the FBI's computers and now belongs to Wired, to the famous George Hotz or Geohot, who after breaking the PS3, was taken to his side by Marc Zuckerberg at Facebook.
Source: Popaganda.gr
