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MATASANO SECURITY - Chicago. New York City. Sunnyvale.
Application Security Consultant
Full-Time or Internship, work visa sponsorship available
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   &lt;Mission Impossible theme plays

This thread will, no doubt, be dominated by posts with laundry lists of requirements.  Many employers will introduce themselves by describing what they want from you.  At Matasano, we're a little different.  We like to start by telling you about us.  This month, I want to try to do that by drawing analogy to Mission Impossible.
What made the original show so great is exactly what was lost in the 'Tom Cruise takes on the world' reboot. The original 1960's and 70's Mission Impossible was defined primarily by a team working together against all odds to achieve their objective.  It acknowledged that what they were doing was improbable, and more so for a solo James Bond or Tom Cruise character. As a team though, each character an expert in their particular focus area, the incredible became credible -- the impossible, possible.
Working at Matasano is a bit like working for the Impossible Missions Force (IMF).  No, we're not taking out thinly veiled cold war era Soviet stand in villains, preventing the rise of the third reich, or being tasked with gathering evidence against criminals "outside the reach of conventional law enforcement."  But in many cases, we're given tight timelines and tasked with difficult objectives.  To the uninitiated, what we do is often seen as impossible, but _together_ we do it every day.
Imagine you (and your team) have a month to circumvent a real world cryptographic system designed and sold for Fortune 500 companies to protect their most sensitive intellectual property.  Maybe you're given a week to investigate and undercover flaws in a brand new Ruby on Rails application.  You might find yourself facing a never-before-seen client/server application, implementing a proprietary binary protocol, and having to figure it out and attack it.  You could end up drawing on binary reverse engineer skills, or reviewing Java code.  But whatever the 'mission', you won't be alone.  You'll be part of a team of experts, each bringing their own skill set to the team.
We don't have very much call for demolitions experts, special effects makeup artists, or champion weightlifters.  Like the IMF, we're looking for people with diverse backgrounds who each bring something unique to the team. There's little in computing that isn't useful for an Application Security Consultant.  We need Reverse Engineers. Developers of all backgrounds, Cryptographers, Electrical Engineers, you name it.  We're as likely to hire a Mathematics PHD as a college drop out.  Many of our best employees have little formal information technology background.  In short, we come from a variety of backgrounds, but share one common trait -- We're curious about nearly everything, and have a wide base of knowledge, but have achieved mastery over one (or more) disciplines.  These are the sorts of people the IMF built their team from, and they're the sort of people who we're looking for at Matasano.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to visit www.matasano.com/careers to learn more and contact us.  In the enclosed dossier, you'll find links to www.cryptopals.com and www.microcorruption.com which may be of interest.  Further intelligence is available at the chargen.matasano.com blog, and you can always contact REDACTED_EMAIL with any remaining questions.  As always, should any member of your team be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow all knowledge of your actions.
This isn't Mission Difficult, it's Mission Impossible.  Difficult should be a walk in the park for you.
This tape will self destruct in five seconds.  Good luck.
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