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Comment by ztan | Hacker News Reader

As far as I know he was the only one who have succeeded in not only hacking in, but also not being traced back despite all of Valves efforts. (They even got the FBI involved.) How many of the "hackpplicants" can you say the same about? The only reason Valve even knew who did it was because he came forward to them. He admired Gabe and his team so much that his dream is to join them. All of this indicate to me that he would make an awesome employee. I have little doubt that he would have poured his heart and soul into the company had he been given the chance. In fact that is the main reason why I found the story to be so tragic.

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My point is it would encourage more people to apply by trying to hack into the company's networks instead of just creating impressive mods, Valve is a game dev/platform company after all not a network security one.

Ahh, I see. Point taken. I would still hire this passionate kid and put him on the network security team. I would then make a public announcement about how the job you get depends on what skill you demonstrate. Which should be the way it works anyways. If you want to join us as a game developer then you need to demonstrate your game developing passion and skills. Either through creating mods with our SDK/platform or writing/creating your own from scratch. However if you want to join us as a network security expert then you got to beat this kid we just hired! =P

If any time you were hacked, you fired the previous network security engineer and hired the guy who just broke in, you'd have a network unusuable by legitimate users and still probably vulnerable to skilled attackers.

Who said anything about firing? How does hiring one guy on to join the team == firing of all of the previous guys? Is there a one man network security team rule at Valve that I'm suppose to know about?

If you hire somebody to your security team every time your network is compromised, and never fire anybody, your network security team will outnumber the rest of your company.

I agree with your point, but we shouldn't forget that this article is clearly sympathetic to the kid. Maybe he isn't quite as cute and cuddly as they make out.

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