"It's the challenge. It's you finding the flaws," he said when asked about his motivation. "It's you against the defenders. It comes from a deep-seeded need to find out how things work."
Larsen, 31, who wears his hair long and has braces on his teeth, is a computer hacker with a twist. His goal is not to wreak havoc, but to boost security for America's pipelines, railroads, utilities and other infrastructure, part of a project backed by the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, or INEEL. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Idaho lab last month launched a new cybersecurity center where expert hackers such as Larsen test computing vulnerabilities. Spread across 890 square miles in a remote area of eastern Idaho, the lab gives experts access to an entire isolated infrastructure such as the one Larsen hacked into.
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