[ISN] Hacker 'Mudge' Returns to BBN

[InfoSec News]

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1758913,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03119TX1K0000594

By Dennis Fisher 
February 2, 2005 

Security industry veteran and itinerant hacker Peiter Zatko decided
this week to rejoin Internet pioneer BBN Technologies Inc. as a
research scientist.

Better known in security circles as Mudge, Zatko was one of the
founding members of the L0pht Heavy Industries hacking team that later
became the technical heart of @stake Inc. He left @stake several years
ago and stayed away from the security industry for a while before
resurfacing last year as the founding scientist at Intrusic Inc., a
Waltham, Mass., startup.

At BBN, Zatko is getting back to his roots in a sense. He worked at
BBN in the 1990s, before joining @stake. BBN is a research and
development firm that specializes in advanced security and networking
projects. The company is best known as the contractor that built the
ARPANET, the predecessor of today's Internet, for the U.S. Department
of Defense. It has gone through several iterations since then but
still does a large amount of government work as well as working with
enterprises.

Zatko gained a reputation in the late 1990s as not only a talented
hacker, but also as a straight shooter unafraid to tell bureaucrats
and executives what he thought of their security efforts. His penchant
for delivering unvarnished opinions made him a sought-after consultant
and speaker, both in the security industry and in Washington. Called
to testify along with several other L0pht members before a Senate
committee in 1998, Zatko famously told the senators that he or any of
his cohorts could take down the Internet in a half hour.