Silver Bullet Talks with Peiter (Mudge) Zatko

P Zatko, better known in the security community as Mudge, was one of the leaders of the L0pht hacker collective, which contributed significantly to the disclosure of serious Internet vulnerabilities and eventually became the security consultancy @stake. He has worked as a division scientist at BBN Technologies, a project manager for DARPA, and a researcher at Google. He’s currently working on a project called the Cyber Independent Testing Lab oratory (Cyber-ITL), a testing organization for computer security mandated by the White House. Tell us about the legendary L0pht. The L0pht started out as a place to store equipment. I think it started primarily with Brian Oblivion and Count Zero’s significant others telling them to get their broken computers out of the hallways and the kitchen sinks. They rented a place with some other friends and their wives and it was a little hangout and a dumping ground for tech stuff. After a while, some of the folks there invited me in, so I paid a little bit of the rent. It was great to hang out with everybody, but I saw too much potential. I was involved in morphing it from a hangout group to becoming kind of like Consumer Reports. We had hardware, software, communications; we were trying to break everything and publish everything because we didn’t want other people to have to struggle to learn how things work the way we did. We wanted other people to say, “Here’s what the L0pht guys published; how can I take it further?”