Would you hire a hacker?

You hear stories about this all the time: some hacker gets caught snooping on some corporate network, gets sent to jail, does his (or her) time, and then promptly on release gets hired by the same company they just violated as a security expert.

I have often put these kinds of stories down to being something not unlike a kind of "computing urban myth", but that was until Sven Jaschan, an 18-year-old from Waffensen in Lower Saxony, who is also thought to be behind the Netsky virus and is currently awaiting trial for his virus-writing antics, was hired by German firewall company Securepoint.

If you think about this, it kind of makes sense. The chap was a teenager when he did the crime - he's likely to grow up and never do anything similar again. And, he obviously has the required skills, or at least the kind of mind and talent needed.

This of course begs the question of other company CIOs - would you hire a hacker? Surprisingly, it looks like 50% of those asked said yes...