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THE WHITE HAT

to a new opportunity—his chance to break out as a white-hat hacker. He’d made a friend in the chat rooms who was starting a real consulting business in San Francisco and was interested in bringing Max on board. Max went up to the city to visit Matt Harrigan, aka, “Digital Jesus.”

Harrigan, just twenty-two, was one of four white hats who’d been profiled in a Forbes cover story the previous year, and he’d cannily used his fifteen minutes of fame to win some seed money for a business: a professional hacking shop in San Francisco’s financial district.

The idea was simple: Corporations would pay his company, Microcosm Computer Resources, to put their networks through a real hack attack, culminating in a detailed report on the client’s security strengths and weaknesses. The business of “penetration testing”—as it was called—had been dominated by the Big Five accounting firms, but Harrigan was already signing up clients by admitting something that no accounting firm would ever announce: that his experience came from real-life hacking, and he was freely hiring other ex-hackers.

MCR would be billing out between $300 and $400 an hour, Harrigan explained. Max would work as a subcontractor, making $100 to $150. All for doing two of the things he liked most in the world: hacking into shit and writing reports.

Max had found his niche. It turned out his single-mindedness made him a natural at penetration testing: He was immune to frustration, hammering at a client’s network for hours, moving from one attack vector to another until he found a way in.

With Max making real money at MCR, Kimi quit her job as a barista and found more rewarding work teaching autistic students. The couple moved from the cramped apartment in Mountain View to a duplex in San Jose. In March, they got married in a church on a college campus in Lakewood, Washington, where Kimi’s family lived.

Tim Spencer and most of the Hungry Programmers went up to Wash-