The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is looking for a few good hackers. They are staging the Grand Challenge competition which is a contest to build software capable of finding and fixing security holes in new code.

"We've looked to the expert community, the computer security community, and the contest that they used to compete and measure skills among themselves – the Capture the Flag circuit," said Mike Walker, DARPA program manager.

Walker helped devise DEF CON's own competitions for the last 4 years. He will be joined by fellow hacker Chris Eagle who will assist in building the code.

Initial team entries for DARPA's competition need to be in by January 14 next year. DARPA wants a fully automated system that the competitors will simply activate and then stand back.

And the reward? The US military is putting up a $2m cash prize for the team that builds a bug-swatter that can work on code written in C and win the challenge; $1m to the runners-up and $750,000-worth of consolation for the third-placed team.

Successful players will no doubt be contacted by security firms with job offers.