Everyone loves a bad-guy-gone-good story, and these black hat hackers who went from lives of crime to corporate nine-to-fives epitomize that genre.
Let’s first make an important distinction: Hackers are not criminals. In fact, “hacker” is a term of high praise in the developer community. But when a hacker is dubbed a “black hat,” it means he or she has broken laws in the pursuit of hacking — perhaps even that he or she has done so for personal gain.
However, many black hat hackers have gone legit in their more mature years. While it’s not uncommon to see former cybercriminals switching teams to work as IT security consultants, many of the more high-profile black hat hackers also find themselves writing books, doin g journalism and even getting public speaking gigs in the cybersecurity world.
So with that understanding, let’s turn our gaze upon these seven fascinating personalities who once hacked indiscriminately and are now employed respectably — some of them even by the companies they once hacked.
Ashley Towns
Towns created the first-ever iPhone worm, a rickrolling bit of code that only affected jailbroken iPhones. Mere weeks after the worm started spreading, Towns was hired by mogeneration, a company that develops iPhone apps, mostly for other clients such as TrueLocal, FoodWatch and Xumii.
Call of Duty Hacker
A 14-year-old Dublin schoolboy hacked into the Microsoft Xbox system this spring. In stark contrast to how Sony handled PlayStation hackers like geohot, Microsoft decided to work with the kid instead. The company hopes to teach the indubitably talented hacker to "use his skills for legitimate purposes."
Christopher T arnovsky
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