How Beto O'Rourke's hacker group changed cybersecurity as we know it

[TexasTowelie]

As of not too long ago, America’s oldest hacking collective was best known not for its work but its alumni or, more specifically, a particular alumnus and current presidential candidate: Beto O’Rourke. This certainly marks a milestone in both American politics and culture, but it wasn’t the primary motivation for Joseph Menn to write his new book about the Cult of the Dead Cow (better known as cDc), the group that O’Rourke hails from.

The work, Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Super Group Might Just Save the World, takes up the lofty task it lays out in its subtitle, at least insofar as the security of the world’s digital systems is concerned. For as long as networked computing devices have pervaded our daily lives, and information security professionals have scrambled to lock them down, the industry still has yet to find its footing in the undertaking. Anyone who has seen breach headline after breach headline can likely corroborate this.

“Lots of other people have done books calling out one or another aspect of the problem [in information security],” Menn said. “But I had not seen any readable, enjoyable book that pointed to a way forward.”

When we asked him what drove him to call to mind the storied hacker collective now, and for audiences that may not know about them, he pointed to the insurrection of rank-and-file tech sector employees in the absence of principled leadership from industry titans.

Read more: https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-the-cult-of-the-dead-cow-revolutionized-cybersecurity/

[Perseus]

1. There you go, there is a place for Beto in the new and coming administration

Cybersecurity Czar.