The View | Greasing the wheels with hackers in cyberspace

Have you heard of Egor Homakov? Well, neither had I until learning of how he discovered a vulnerability in the Starbucks loyalty card system allowing online hackers to extract cash from the company.

Homakov, who works for an outfit called Sakurity, which deals with issues like this, promptly reported his findings to Starbucks, which responded with threats of legal action rather than gratitude for his help. Mind you what more could be expected from a company that specializes in selling unnecessarily complicated sugary drinks yet claims to be a coffee specialist.

Starbucks, which itself is busy developing various apps and other cyber devices, is displaying much less of a welcome to talented hackers who spot software vulnerabilities than companies in Silicon Valley. Over there some of the biggest names, including Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have been offering rewards to hackers who identify these vulnerabilities and they do so without asking too many pointed questions about how these people managed to penetrate their systems.

In fact both the rewards to hackers and the scope of companies offering big money is, if anything, expanding. This raises a wider question of how businesses should deal with people and organisations that skate close to the fringes of the law, not necessarily crossing the line but are most definitely somewhere in the borderlands of legality.

And this is a problem not confined to the corporate world as we have recently seen in revelations that the Australian government has been paying off people smugglers to ensure that their boats are turned away from Australia’s shores. Defending this action Prime Minister Tony Abbott said: ‘We’ve done the right thing, we’ve done the moral thing, the decent thing, the compassionate thing. We’ve stopped the boats by doing whatever is necessary within the law to stop the boats’.

Abbott may well be exercising a liberal interpretation of what is within the law but the fact that remains that despite its dubious legality his government’s actions seems to be working.