PETALING JAYA: Hack In The Box (M) Sdn Bhd — which organises annual hacker conferences in the country and elsewhere — has formed a subsidiary to recruit data security specialists.

Called HITB Jobs (M) Sdn Bhd, the newly formed company will specialise in international recruitment and placement services.

David Michaux, managing director of HITB Jobs, said many companies are realising that having information security specialists inhouse is more cost effective than hiring outside resources.

Having these specialists inhouse also helps the companies boost and better maintain their level of security.

With that in mind, HITB Jobs will search for, evaluate and recruit these skilled professionals for such companies.

The subsidiary is a joint venture between HITB and Bulgaria-based NDMTeam, an information security company.

HITB is the owner of HITB Security Conference (HITBSecConf) — billed as the largest network security conference in Asia Pacific and the Middle East.

Some pluses

According to Michaux, HITB Jobs has better expertise than regular recruitment agencies to vet and gauge the skills of the specialists that it handles.

“We can ensure that all the professionals that are employed through us are as highly skilled as they claim to be in their curriculum vitaes,” he told In.Tech.

He said HITB Jobs would also have access to its parent company’s wealth of international security specialists to help it sort through the CVs or make recommendations.

The new venture is also good news to local specialists and those in the region, announced HITB Jobs.

Michaux said professionals in South-East Asia are undervalued and underpaid, compared to their counterparts in other areas of the world.

A competent data-security professional, he said, can earn between three and four times his Malaysian wages in an equivalent position in the Middle East or Europe.

HITB Job’s recruitment portal — http://jobs.hackinthebox.org — will go live tomorrow, in conjunction with HITBSecConf 2009 at the Crowne Plaza Mutiara here.

Currently, it has customers in the banking, government, oil and gas, and telecommunications sectors. Most of these are in the Middle East and Europe.