Rob Olson breaks into websites for a living. But don't call the cops; he's a good guy. Olson — who is also a senior lecturer in the Department of Computing Security at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York, and technical director of the University's Eaton Cybersecurity lab — is a white-hat hacker. Or, as he puts it, a bit less dramatically, an expert in offensive security. That means he hacks businesses' websites, at their request, to expose security weaknesses. Then he tells his clients how they can fix the problems he exploited to get in.
It's a much-needed service because someone, somewhere, is always trying to get into websites. Pretty much all sites are under more or less constant attack. Olson calls this continual barrage of login attempts "a sort of background radiation."
