Rolling stone did an article on team im on/company I work for :tspry:
Its on cyberwar and random hacker stuff :tup:
And its in HTML5 :tspry:
Even if people are not interested in the subject, they should check it out because the site is done very well :tup:
I thought the layout was annoying at first but its growing on me.
Article is probably useful to people in IT looking for career paths and gives some insight into what the government does offensively.
Tl;dr
I clipped Accuvant related peaces for you 
Hey, dude!” says David Bonvillain. “Let me buy you a mojito!” It’s not even noon at the Holiday Inn bar, but Bonvillain, head of the Denver-based Accuvant LABS, one of the most elite and flashiest computer-security firms, is already working the crowd because, as he puts it, the competition is “feverish.”
A brash, Ferrari-driving 40-year-old who chain-puffs an e-cigarette and is sleeved with tattoos, Bonvillain is among the country’s top hacker scouts. While the feds try to recruit hackers on the glory of public service, Accuvant has honed a sexier pitch. “We built an environment that allows people to legally do the things that would put them in jail,” Bonvillain says, exhaling vapor, “and we have a great time and make a good living doing it.”
Accuvant represents an upside to cyberwar: a booming market. Corporations spent $60 billion worldwide on information-security services last year, according to a report by Gartner, a technology-research firm, and are expected to shell out a whopping $86 billion in 2016. To the consternation of businesses around the world, entrepreneurial hackers hunt for security flaws, then sell the technical info to governments from Russia to North Korea, as well as the National Security Agency here. Google and Microsoft are among those who pony up as well, hoping to improve their products. Technical details on a single vulnerability go for as much as $150,000.
Accuvant specializes in attack and penetration, or “attack and pen” for short, infiltrating their clients’ computer systems to expose and improve weaknesses. Their clients include everyone from banks and hotels to federal agencies, which can pay upward of $100,000 for a single test of their services. To maintain integrity during a penetration test, the client’s underlings aren’t told they’re being targeted. A Minnesota casino hired Accuvant to try to break into its computer room and access its most sensitive data. Not only did the team succeed – convincing workers they were tech-support staff – they walked out the door carrying the casino’s computer servers. They then posed with their bounty by the slot machines, flipping off the camera for a picture they sent to the casino’s boss. Another time, they hacked a Department of Defense contractor by parking a rental car outside a warehouse and scanning the wireless network with laptops and antennas. “It’s sad, honestly, how vulnerable they are,” Bonvillain says.
Accuvant understands the talent better than most, because they rose from the hacker underground themselves. Bonvillain, a metal guitarist who spent a night in jail in high school after getting busted riding his motorcycle over 100 mph, started hacking computers and phone phreaking while at James Madison University in Virginia in the mid-Nineties. “I wanted to break into stuff,” he says. “I thought it was the coolest thing.” Inspired by the movie War Games but eager to stay out of trouble, he eventually put his skills to use as a professional hacker testing security for companies that paid him. “As soon as I found out that information security was actually a job and, even better, a job you could make some good cash at, that was all I wanted to do,” he says.
Jon “Humperdink” Miller, a hulking, goateed 31-year-old in a backward baseball cap and shorts, who, as head of research and development, oversees Accuvant’s military clients, is like a supersmart Chris Farley. He started attending hacker conventions at age 13 and became notorious when he appeared at DefCon with no shirt and a vanity license plate of his nickname around his neck. He jokes that his greatest hacker skill is “drinking,” for which he has an award named after himself at the Vegas confab. When he was in high school in San Diego, he says, he made $80,000 a year doing his own attack-and-pen operations. At 17, the National Security Agency offered him a college education, a company car and a substantial stipend if he agreed to work for them after graduation. But he passed on the offer. “Guys like me refuse to get clearance,” he says, gulping a beer. “You have to be professional. You have to be reserved. Here, like, if you’re a loud asshole and you’re smart, sweet! We know a lot of loud assholes.
Bonvillain balks over security clearance too. “If you’ve smoked pot more than six times, you can’t join the FBI,” he says. “When they interviewed me, I asked, ‘In one day?’” The drug test is no small issue. A three-year no-use policy eliminates a huge slice of the young hackers coming out of school into the workforce. “That disqualifies a bunch of people that would be perfectly skilled and trustworthy,” says Moss, “just because they smoked pot in college.”
Attracting and keeping cyberwarriors is as much about marketing a lifestyle as it is offering big bucks. (The money is good, though, with salaries for top contractors at firms like Accuvant easily topping $200,000 a year.) “Look at Alex,” Bonvillain says, pointing at Accuvant’s head of security architecture, Alex Kah, a tatted-up Kentuckian with a slacker drawl. “Could you imagine him trying to go into the NSA with ‘Louisville’ tattooed across his neck?” Accuvant hires electronic-music duo the Crystal Method for its parties and makes the hippest swag in the business: bootleg Adidas tracksuits, stickers and T-shirts modeled after Iron Maiden’s “The Trooper.” To score one notorious hacker, they agreed to buy him his own gold-plated, $1,000 espresso machine. “The reason we’re successful is because we market this like a metal band,” Bonvillain says.
And they’re fired up by the enemy. Humperdink grows red in the face when he starts ranting about how China gives a pass to its rogue army of hackers. “If you’re a lone Chinese hacker not employed by the Chinese and you want to hack Charles Schwab, go for it,” Humperdink says. “Consequence-free. Do whatever you want. You’re fighting the great Satan. They’re completely covert about operational security. They don’t talk about active hacks against the U.S. That’s completely off the record. That shit happens every day.”
Related: Lone American Wikileaks Member Fights Repressive Regimes, Including His Own
Their outrage makes them even more patriotic. Humperdink comes from a family of Marines and law enforcement. Bonvillain draws inspiration from his dad, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Army, who now works as an intelligence officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency – serving posts in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq – and has been nominated for the counterintelligence’s hall of fame. “I’m deeply patriotic,” Bonvillain says. It’s the same blend of working-class blues and American pride that fueled the old military. “Every serious hacker that I know came from very, very blue-collar or underprivileged backgrounds,” he says. “It made them hungry. They’re willing to do whatever it takes.”
Companies like Accuvant are capable of creating custom software that can enter outside systems and gather intelligence or even shut down a server, for which they get can paid up to $1 million. For example, Humperdink says, they would be able to unleash an attack to take a country like China completely offline. “We could stop their cyberwarfare program,” he says. “Five years ago, I remember the North Koreans were doing missile testing, right? If [the U.S. government] came to a company like us and said, ‘Here’s $15 million,’ we could turn a North Korean missile into a brick. If you came to us with $20 million and said, ‘We wanna disable every computer there in Iran, and they’d have to replace them’ – not a problem.” For added flair, each program Accuvant sells gets its own cyberpunk handle – like Purple Mantis – and is delivered on a jet-black thumb drive inside a custom case with the name laser-etched on a plaque.
“So how many offensive plays are going on now?” I ask.
“A lot,” Bonvillain says.
“More than people would realize?”
“Yes,” he replies.
Then Bonvillain falls silent. He puffs his e-cigarette, considering a more diplomatic response. “The U.S. government,” he says, “is great at hiding everything they do.”