Firms hack away at cyberattacks

He's 26, likes industrial and electronic music, has a bleached-blond Mohawk haircut and sometimes, Mikhail Davidov said, he starts his day "at the crack of noon."

The late hours are in front of a computer, working on reverse engineering, tearing apart computer programs to find their vulnerabilities.

Sometimes he works 18 hours straight. "There are few hackers out there who are 'morning people,' " Davidov said.

These days, the front lines for security don't only include soldiers carrying weapons.

They include computer whiz kids like Davidov, who works for the Leviathan Security Group, a 20-person firm that operates out of second-floor offices in a renovated 1918 building in Seattle.

Chad Thunberg, chief operating officer of Leviathan, said he can relate to Davidov, remembering his own younger days.

Thunberg, who is 35 and married with two children, said, "I'm considered a grandpa in my industry. There was a time when I was the Mikhail equivalent. You live and breathe security."

Every second, in various parts of the world, there are 18 cybercrime victims — some 1.6 million a day — according to a 2012 Norton by Symantec study.

On Friday, the Wenatchee World newspaper reported that a Leavenworth, Wash., hospital said hackers stole more than $1 million from the hospital's electronic bank account. The Chelan County, Wash., treasurer said it had been able to retrieve about $133,000 by notifying recipient bank accounts, most in the Midwest and East Coast.

And the Associated Press reported that LivingSocial, an online deals site, said Friday that its website was hacked and the personal data of more than 50 million customers may have been affected — names, e-mail addresses, date of birth of some users and encrypted passwords.

Then there are the Chinese hackers, who blasted into the news in February when Mandiant, an Internet security firm, released a report saying that a group linked to the People's Liberation Army had systemically stolen confidential data from at least 141 U.S. firms.

In his State of the Union address, President Obama warned, "Now our enemies are also seeking the ability to sabotage our power grid, our financial institutions and our air traffic control systems."

Another "white hat" hacker is Adam Cecchetti, 31, who used to work at Leviathan and then in 2010 became one of the founders of Déjà vu Security, which operates out of a second-floor renovated loft in Seattle's Capitol Hill. Sometimes, he has colored his hair blue.

Davidov and Cecchetti are on the front lines of fighting off the "black hat" hackers. Yes, that is how they describe their enemy.

The latter includes those sending out phishing e-mails that look like they came from a legitimate source but are fakes trying to get your passwords and credit-card information.

Or maybe they are black hats trying to compromise a company's website just so they can boast about it in hacker circles.

For the white hats, their unique skill at finding where a program is vulnerable and how to close the digital doors that the black hats use to penetrate a website is worth $120,000 to $130,000 a year, Thunberg said.

Their clients aren't exactly keen to publicize that they seek Internet security, said Thunberg, and that's often written into their contracts with Leviathan.

Thunberg said his company's average contract size is for around $70,000. Citing privacy, he said only that most are Fortune 1000 companies.

But one client that didn't mind talking is a Washington-based company called Silent Circle. For $20 a month, it offers a service that encrypts voice, text and video on a user's smartphone, tablet or computer.

Their customers, said Jon Callas, Silent Circle's chief technical officer, include U.S. businesses "doing work in China and Eastern Europe and other places where they don't want their phone calls tapped."

His company, Callas said, hired Leviathan to evaluate the encrypting software for vulnerabilities and fix them.

At Déjà vu Security, Cecchetti said, work that they've done includes posing as new employees at a financial institution, given the standard access to computers. Firms routinely give computer "administrative privileges" to only a handful of individuals.

But, Cecchetti said, "within a couple of weeks, we had basically control of the entire organization and could access pretty much anything we wanted."

Déjà vu put together "a very large report" on how to fix things, he said.

Hackers such as Davidov and Cecchetti have certain similarities. For one thing, they started tinkering with computers when they were kids, and that passion never stopped.

Cecchetti grew up in Greensburg, Pa. He helped start a computer club in high school and said that although he ran track and played soccer, "I was plenty nerdy."