Pentagon hacker McKinnon reinvents himself as SEO guru Former hacker and US extradition target Gary McKinnon has found a new career as a search engine optimisation expert. McKinnon - who successfully fought a 10-year campaign against extradition to the US over charges he hacked into Pentagon systems - has launched Small SEO, which specialises in making sure small businesses appear …
Those damages included hiring an external security consultant via the CIA. He went through each and every system thoroughly for over 2 years, charging a hefty hourly rate, after which he instructed the Pentagon brass that Passw0rd1 is not a secure admin password and is probably how McKinnon got in.
My guess is that the majority of this cash was used to pay lawyers and consultants for work that probably should have been paid for and completed BEFORE Gary came along.
I believe that if you have to spend any amount of money to tighten security AFTER a hack then this does not fall under "damages" because that work should have already been done.
The total cost of actual damage caused by Gary was probably much, much lower - probably not even 1% of that.
And I'm very glad he's now able to use his skills to make an honest living. Should have been given a hundred hours community service by the local magistrate and the chance to get on with life much, much sooner. Instead he spent what should have been the best years of his life awaiting extradition and is still confined to the UK until the US legal system and politicians stop behaving like drooling idiots.
The SEO on his own site and some of the clients I've looked at is poor or very basic at best. It looks like he's read a few chapters of a version of SEO for Dummies from 10 years ago and completely missed what Google et al have done in the last few years. Unfortunately he's typical of the vast majority of SEO peeps who mainly talk the talk, but give the very few who can also walk the walk, a bad name.
Ok Guys, lets face it the US government have a real issue with this guy.
But the good news is that if he can make the change from hacking to white hat SEO with the brain power he clearly has a lot of people will be very happy.
He is a computer genius not a paedophile, or burglar, or rapist he just loves computers.... and after a hack the US will get more advanced at defending.... its evolution. War or a battle of any kind evolves those involved, that's how as the human race, we have evolved more over the past 100 years that we have over the past 2000.
Plus he is in the limelight now.... and it would be daft to attract any further unwanted attention.
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