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

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...

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.