Nah. Our stupid ass government only recently started hiring hackers who smoke weed. But even then, there’s too much stupid red tape.
“Both the NSA and the DOD have a ton of talented hackers, yet when it comes to actually performing disruptive cyber operations, for some reason we as a country are just frozen and scared,” Caceres says. “And that needs to change.”
He points to ransomware actors, mostly based in Russia, who extracted more than a billion dollars of extortion fees from victim companies in 2023 while crippling hospitals and government agencies. North Korea–affiliated hackers, meanwhile, stole another $1 billion in cryptocurrency last year, funneling profits into the coffers of the Kim regime. All of that hacking against the West, he argues, has been carried out with relative impunity. “We sit there while they hack us,” Caceres says.