by Elinor Mills, CNET News

Peiter Zatko–a respected hacker known as “Mudge”–has been tapped to be a program manager at DARPA, where he will be in charge of funding research designed to help give the U.S. government tools needed to protect against cyberattacks, CNET has learned.

Zatko will become a program manager in mid-March within the Strategic Technologies Office at DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), which is the research and development office for the Department of Defense. His focus will be cybersecurity, he said in an interview with CNET on Tuesday.

One of his main goals will be to fund researchers at hacker spaces, start-ups, and boutiques who are most likely to develop technologies that can leapfrog what comes out of large corporations. “I want revolutionary changes. I don’t want evolutionary ones,” he said.

He’s also hoping that giving a big push to research and development will do more to advance the progress of cybersecurity than public policy decisions have been able to do over the past few decades.  “Not much has changed” with regard to strengthening the U.S. cybersecurity position, he said. “As a society, we have a larger dependence on being wired in, yet the government only focuses on particular areas.” ………………

Zatko cut his security chops as a teen-age hacker in the 1980s and managed to stay one step ahead of the law. He ran the L0pht hacker space during the 1990s, where he invented anti-sniffing technology that became the first remote promiscuous system detector used by the Defense Department. He also pioneered work on buffer overflows, which are a basis for many computer network attacks.  Report