Ex-hackers 'rubbish at security'
The skills that make a good hacker are not the same as those required by an IT security officer, delegates were told.
"Everyone thinks that if you know how to break into a system then you must know how to protect one. It's rubbish. I could teach a monkey to break into a system in four hours," claimed Ira Winkler, chief security strategist at Hewlett Packard.
"While there are highly skilled technical hackers out there, they are the ones you never know about because they don't get caught."
But most hackers are IT professionals in their 20s and 30s, suggesting that companies may be late in their realisation that cyber-poachers do not make good cyber-gamekeepers.
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