True Tales of (Mostly) White Hat Hacking

Stings, penetration pwns, spy games — it’s all in a day’s work along the thin gray line of IT security, writes Roger A. Grimes, introducing his five true tales of (mostly) white hat hacking. “Three guys sitting in a room, hacking away, watching porn, and getting paid to do it — life was good,” Grimes writes of a gig probing for vulnerabilities in a set-top box for a large cable company hoping to prevent hackers from posting porn to the Disney Channel feed. Spamming porn spammers, Web beacon stings with the FBI, luring a spy to a honeypot — “I can’t say I’m proud of all the things I did, but the stories speak for themselves.”