“No red team, no blue team, just good works. Hackers for Charity lives up to the name.”
That’s the headline of the recent blog post from our friends at ExtraHop. I was thrilled to hear of their “Red vs Blue” fundraising contest at this year’s Blackhat conference. The fundraising aspect was pretty simple: the team leaders picked a charity and if their team one, the charity would receive $10,000! Our friend Paul Asadoorian (@securityweekly, Web site) picked us as his charity of choice (which was amazing) and sure enough, the red team won!
I was blown away by the generosity of ExtraHop, the kindness of Paul and his team and the thoughtfulness of all the participants that took part. However, I also felt a bit unsettled, knowing that the Blue Team charity, the amazing folks at CODE.org, were walking away from the contest empty-handed. I reached out to Rachel, the coordinator at ExtraHop with our dilemma and she already had a backup plan in place and had already decided that a smaller donation would go to Code.org. I loved ExtraHop‘s heart. Their contest was super cool, fun and completely altruistic. They were doing a Good Thing.
However, in the spirit of the hacker community that has made all of our work possible, I wanted to take this contest to the next level, reach out to the excellent folks at CODE.org and split our winnings. To that end, we are making a $4,000 donation to CODE.org on behalf of the hacker community. We hope they keep up the awesome work and look forward to working with them in the future to raise the bar for the next generation of “skilled computer experts that uses their technical knowledge to overcome problems” (hackers!)
-Johnny
