Abstract

"Skill Capture: Hackers, Honeypots, and the Co-Creation of Cybersecurity"

Jacob Bruggeman, Johns Hopkins University (jacob.bruggeman@gmail.com)

This paper examines how software known as honeypots—deceptive digital systems designed to lure and study intruders—transformed the political economy of expertise in cybersecurity during the 1990s and 2000s. Whereas businesses and research institutions once courted hackers as skilled but unruly employees, the development and deployment of honeypots allowed them to capture the skills of hackers without employing hackers themselves. By automating surveillance of hacker behavior and translating those observations into codified “best practices,” honeypots rendered illicit knowledge extractable, replicable, and profitable. Drawing on trade journals, government reports, and professional debates within the computer security community, this paper situates the rise of honeypots within a longer history of managerial strategies to observe, measure, and appropriate the expertise of skilled laborers at a distance. In reframing cybersecurity as a site of labor history, it argues that the honeypot exemplified a broader shift in American business practice: from managing creative or deviant workers directly to mediating their work through data capture and simulation. The paper thus extends histories of computing and management into the digital era, showing how the “co-creation” of cybersecurity by hackers and professionals was also a process of dispossession—one in which the hacker’s ingenuity was absorbed into automated systems of surveillance and control that underwrote the networked economy.