Black hats needed to come to the rescue

Embedded technology guru and journalist John Blyler recently dug up an old proposal on the need for companies to hire “black hat” developers or at least learn to hack like them to keep up with the rash of cybersecurity breaches filling the news pages. The original article appeared in Wireless System Design back in 2003 where he suggested that IT departments should, “step out of the bright light of respectability and into the shadowy world of the hacker.” That got a lot of negative feedback from IT managers then, but his idea is now becoming a standard concept among many journalists.

In a recent Linkedin post, Blyler brought up his decade-old suggestion as he reported on a presentation at a recent NXP event in Frankfurt Germany when no less than Andy Greenberg, Wired Senior Editor, said that companies needed to hire an army of hackers to confront automotive security issues.

“(Greenberg) went on to say the security hacking problem was not like fixing a seat belt or a bug in your power steering. Instead, hackers represented a dynamic problem with adversaries,” Blyler reported. “This constant game of cat-and-mouse suggests a corresponding continuous update of security software to the car under attack, which was confirmed by a follow-on speaker at the event.”

We are going to look into this issue of legitimizing black-hat development next week in our next “Ask Jack” session because it goes far beyond the automotive world, and we will also be looking for more input from guru Blyler.