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Apple has added to its growing security team with the hiring of noted white-hat hacker Kristin Paget, who broke and then got hired to fix Windows security, Wired reports.

Kristin Paget, formerly Chris and originally from the UK but lately of California, is the inventor of the term "shatter attack" in a 2002 paper on a system for privilege-escalation attacks on applications in Windows NT, 2000, and XP operating systems. Microsoft issued a partial patch for the problem in December, but it wasn't finally fixed until Vista came out.

Paget has made a name for herself with a number of interesting hacks across the technological spectrum outside of the world of pure software. In 2007 she was forced to pull out of a Black Hat conference talk on hacking building entry systems under threat of legal sanction from a major US RFID manufacturer.

A few years later, she showed off a $250 proof-of-concept device that cloned three passport card RFID tags during a 20-minute drive in downtown San Francisco. Later that year she demoed a $4,000 prototype that could match the random channel-hopping systems used by GSM, allowing extended eavesdropping.

At the 2010 DefCon security conference, Paget set up a spoof GSM base station in the conference hall that hacked many of the audience's phones and left them messages telling them their security had been compromised. All participants had been warned beforehand – Paget's good, but she's strictly white hat.

Paget has worked at a variety of security consultancies since her sojourn at Redmond, but in July she announced on her Twitter feed that she was looking for another job. "I've done too much breaking of things, it's time to create for a change," she said.

It now appears that Apple has scooped her up as part of its attempts to beef up security and fend off a growing malware threat. Cupertino has been quietly hiring security experts for a few years now, although many haven't lasted long at the company, citing Apple's tricky corporate culture.

While Paget has been a regular on the DefCon/Black Hat/Shmoocon hacking conference circuit, it's not clear whether her new employers will allow her to continue. Apple's first presentation at Black Hat this year was widely mocked as insultingly low in information, whereas Paget is more of a full-disclosure type of person.

Nevertheless, Apple has itself a valuable asset in Paget, and it's going to be interesting to see what kind of changes will sneak into iOS and OS X that come from their new hire. ®

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