Marc Maiffret could be corporate america's worst nightmare. He's 23, he's frighteningly proficient with computers and he seems to have a special aptitude for being able to remotely hack into any network in the world running on Microsoft Windows. But stop worrying: Maiffret is an "ethical hacker," devoting his energy to fixing security holes rather than exploiting them. eEye Digital Security, the southern California software company he cofounded in 1998 (his official title: chief hacker), is a leader in an industry that hunts vulnerabilities in the complex software that runs computer networks. "It's much harder to secure a system than destroy it," Maiffret says. "You have to figure out all the ways someone can break in.
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