As opposed to needing to dip their toes in “illegal” conduct and making their income streams unsound or too risky in terms of legal liabillity by doing ransom demands
Requires someone wants to hire you or allow you to hack them, otherwise it’s still illegal, and you can go to jail, even if you don’t take anything, and reveal it to the company.
Some companies make rewards for hacking their systems if you come to them, but usually you are just paid a one time amount for finding a vulnerability, and that’s it.Or, in other words:
(inb4 “not murder”)
and use their fiduciary duty as a legal basis to compel patronage of their services
Do you mean a hacker should find a company’s tech vulnerability and then either: a) inform the company that a vulnerability exists and they should pay $XYZ to learn what it is, or b) inform the company that a vulnerability is known and it will be disclosed unless $XYZ is paid, or c) simply inform the company of the vulnerability and hope that they’ll pay the hacker to consult on how to fix it?
Scenario A is generally permissible, if such a vulnerability does exist. Things like NDAs and contracts can be agreed before the hacker describes the vulnerability, to legally protect the company in case the hacker was bluffing. That said, even without contracts, falsely claiming that a vulnerability exists or that the hacker knows what it is – when they infact don’t – would be fraud in most jurisdictions.
Scenario B is blackmail, and is illegal. [shocked Pikachu face]
Scenario C is possible, although there’s no guarantee that the company is looking for consulting. Although if the hacker’s speciality is both how to identify and patch such specific vulnerabilities, this may be more likely.
That said, taking a step back, are you sure you meant to reference the fiduciary duty that corporate directors owe to their shareholders? This is not the same as the business judgement rule, where directors must act with reasonable prudence in the company’s best interest. The latter rule exists because there may be multiple tactics to fully honor the fiduciary duty, and it would be inequitable to allow suits against directors just because they decided to achieve the objective in different ways. There is no singularly correct way to run a company.
Neither the fiduciary duty nor the business judgement rule penalize a director just because a business challenge arises, such as a data breach. Rather, the fiduciary duty is violated when a director hides info from the shareholders, or does not follow explicit instructions from the shareholders, for example. And the business judgment rule will not protect a director that is working in bad faith or takes unreasonable risks with the company’s assets.
Declining to hire a hacker as a consultant is a reasonable course of action. It would be a strange – but not impossible – instruction for the shareholders to order the management a priori to “never negotiate with terrorists” but absent such a hyper-specific command, there wouldn’t be a violation of the director’s duty of obedience.
Hackers are thus not guaranteed an income stream here. Although I would argue perhaps companies should be required to honor some equivalent to the maritime Law Of Salvage, where the hacker is guaranteed a cut for helping, however that may be defined. Limiting such a law to only data breaches would make sense, since losing other people’s data has cascading effects, whereas just losing money is borne solely by the company.
Most hackers are responsible. Hackerone is a site where anyone can sign up and start claiming bug bounties for reporting vulnerabilities. They claim to have 2 million active hackers. Just like anything else, the people breaking the law are in the minority and probably resorted to it after trying to make money the legal way.
Most companies dont give a shit about security except for 6-8 months after a recent hack.
But why would that not fall under their specific fiduciary duties to attend to?
They use fiduciary responsibillity as a legal and ethical defense to ward off disrupting their most harmful efforts, how can that not be moreso relevant towards defending their cyber stuffs?
Because you are not thinking like a board member.
You have an IT system that has been in place since before you were hired. Let’s be generous and say it was developed in the 90s and running on an AS400. All costs are accounted for and is costing $400k a month, the platform is working as intended and staff are adequately trained. The platform is rock solid and you don’t recall the last time a catastrophic failure happened.
Your IT underling comes to you one day and says we need to change this business critical and it will cost $1.2 million as a Capex with an ongoing opex of $600K a month. it will take 4 years to develop, another 6 months to migrate the data between systems and take another 4 months to train staff back to a basic level.
How in the world do you pitch that to your fellow board members?
this guy boards
You’d be amazed the kinds of excuses companies can come up with to avoid doing something they don’t want to do.
Dude is out here thinking corporations are lawful. Cyber security costs money, money that they pocket otherwise.
My dude, the moment you say “just”, you make us all run away. “Just” is the keyword that says “someone is going to trivialize a bunch of shit they don’t understand” and that never ends well.
Good point, fixed it. Fixxed a couple points ;)
It’s called “white hat” not white cap.
Haha my bad
Some people just want to be criminals. They are gamblers or just enjoy feeling superior
There are companies for specific ethical hacking and to expose cybersecurity flaws. They would just need to apply to them.
Because a lot of them ended up getting picked up by the government, hired to be in cyber security departments. If what they’re doing, to them, brings them security/stability and not jail, they’ll take it.
IIRC, there’s an investment group that does a version of this - they short the stock then release and publicize the information.
Most white hat pen testers apply their trade under contract for security audits. A lot of companies, especially those that work for governments, have requirements to get security audits regurally. It is not outside the realm of reason to hire a company, lay out the rules of engagment, have them assign a team to try, try to break in, detail what they did and any vulnerabilities that were found.
The flip side is that these people are paid very very well to do this (especially people who will risk their skin on physicial security). They take a very “defense against the dark arts” methodology, the best way to teach people how to defend against attacks is to actually attack them and tell them where they messed up. For that reason, you get conventions like DEFCON where security experts from alphabet soup agencies, private sector, white, black and grey hats all meet to see what the others are doing. The presentations are a blast to watch, if you can undertand the arcane runes and rituals of the worlds best security wizards.
Ha! That was fun in the 90s. Good luck now.
