After-School Hacking Special

securitas writes "The NY Times writes about an after-school program that teaches teenagers how to hack, attack and defend systems. There doesn't seem to have been the same uproar as the virus-creation course at the University of Calgary (see previous Slashdot thread), even though the participants in Tiger Team (the name of the program) are younger than the university students."

Comments

Cool Idea

[(54)T-Dub]

Sounds like a very interesting program. If someone is serious about system security, this seems like the best way to learn.

I think the program directors argument should qualm any skeptics.

"Some of them grilled us pretty heavily on the concept of, 'Well, aren't you training hackers?' " he said. "I go, yeah. I have a black belt in martial arts. If I wanted to be a bad guy, I could go and hurt people. But I don't do it. That's not the emphasis of the program."

Re:Cool Idea

[Bodrius]

Of course, if you're teaching programmers that's the way to do it. But programmers are not the ones who deal with security problems every day, SysAdmins do.

Typically a SysAdmin staff does not consist of programmers, and even if they are programmers, their job is not to write the security-intensive code and send the company to bankruptcy while they re-implement the OS, the terminal emulators, the network protocol, etc. Their job is to solve problems using the most efficient solution, and this often includes using other people's already developed, tested, code.

Their job is to install it, configure it, manipulate it and understand at a high level how it works; and when things inevitably go bad, minimize the damage and fix it quickly.

Learning to predict HOW things can go bad would help a lot.

Re:Im curious where they get their teachers....

[ceejayoz]

Hey... there's a link to an article there for a reason...

Mr. Robinson, 38, who runs a small information security company... ...he created a nonprofit organization, the Information Security Foundation, dedicated to educating the public about information security...

When will people ever learn...

[Robin Edman]

... what a hacker is: http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

Contact Info??

[thrillbert]

Anyone have any contact information? I am actually interested in pursuing something like this in my area. Give the teens something to do this summer.

---
It was a book to kill time for those who liked it better dead.

More about the University of Calgary

[Blarfy_Snarflepoop]

We've released a statement outlining our position. Happy Reading...

Re:Hacking in the media

[atr-isf]

I absolutely hate the word "hacking" when used in the media

I read the MIT Hacker's Dictionary before many people posting in SlashDot were born. The fact is that "hacker" and "hacking" have had a pejorative connotation for a long time. I remember the University of Maine operations manager calling me a "hacker" (in a disparaging tone) in 1980 when I first exploited a race condition to break out of the limited student shell into "full CMS" (the humor here will only be apparent to those who have experience with IBM's VM mainframe operating system).

You can rail against this usage all you want, but it's an accomplished fact--and I at least have given up trying to convert the rest of humanity to "cracker" or "threat agent." Perhaps we can all join a class action suit against "the media" based on defamation of character, and force them to use something more acceptable. But probably not.

Andy

Andrew T. Robinson
President, Chairman
Information Security Foundation
www.isfound.org

Re:Any Questions - I am on the Board of the Progra

[fjaffe]

Good Question. Andy Robinson, the originator of the program thought up the name. A lot of time was spent considering the social consequences in high school. In many ways, the kids attracted to the program are already less socially active with many high school peers, because they are into computers. We hope this environment actually helps them learn teamwork because it requires a lot of interaction among the team members.

Point of view from a member of the Tiger Team

[TodFarkus1]

I seem to find the less people tend to do their research, the more ridiculous they sound on Slashdot.

Perhaps people decided not to bother going to the ISF website?

Today, I set up an Apache server and beat the bloody hell out of it. Throught this, I learned new things and applied the lessons. When the other team gets to hacking the Apache server, I'm going to learn something that I didn't know existed.

Perhaps over-reliance on the New York Times (which, as most now know, isn't a very reliable source) tends to give people a demonized or skewed image of what the whole program is trying to accomplish.

Oh, and a note to the AD&Der's: As a teenager with built up rage and paranoia, I could devour your miserable soul, after taking a +10 elixer and Pills of Sleepless Nights (No-Doz).

Love and kisses,
-Dave C.