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The L0pht Legacy

EH-Net - Sanabria - L0pht2020 Years Ago, Some Hackers Visited Congress…

May 19th, 1998. I was just wrapping up my first year of college. My grades were terrible. Instead of going to classes, I had been huddled in my tiny dorm room with the computer my parents bought me. I grew up with a computer in the house from an early age, but having my own computer was different. I was interested in every aspect of it, learning everything I could and enjoying hard-wired access to the then very young Internet.

L0pht Heavy Industries was way ahead of me. At the time, L0pht was a 6-year-old hacker think tank based out of Cambridge, MA. On the morning of May 19th, 1998, seven members of the L0pht were in the nation’s capital, donning suits and preparing to testify before a United States Senate Committee. They hadn’t flown to D.C. in first class or even economy. Instead, they rented a van, piled in, and drove down. L0pht wasn’t just ahead of me — they were ahead of an entire industry.

In fact, in some ways, they ‘seeded’ much of the cybersecurity industry. On a regular basis, I’ll be talking to someone or researching a story and someone’s work history, product or a company will somehow lead back to L0pht or @stake, its commercial successor. It’s still a relatively young and small industry. An industry with a workforce still in the hundreds of thousands or low millions and with revenues in the tens of billions. That might not sound small but look at it this way: Home Depot’s revenue is still bigger than our entire industry.

Upon reflection of this historic anniversary, it occurred to me that some of the issues L0pht raised in 1998 probably remained unresolved. I started to wonder — just how far ahead were L0pht’s (Read more...)

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from The Ethical Hacker Network authored by Adrian Sanabria. Read the original post at: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/eh-net/~3/yh0xzNFdrA8/