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Pentagon Seeks a New Generation of Hackers
Hugh Pickens writes "Forbes reports on a new military-funded program aimed at leveraging an untapped resource: the population of geeky high school and college students in the US. The Cyber Challenge will create three new national competitions for high school and college students intended to foster a young generation of cybersecurity researchers. 'The contests will test skills applicable to both government and private industry: attacking and defending digital targets, stealing data, and tracing how others have stolen it. [...] The Department of Defense's Cyber Crime Center will expand its Digital Forensics Challenge, a program it has run since 2006, to include high school and college participants, tasking them with problems like tracing digital intrusions and reconstructing incomplete data sources. In the most controversial move, the SANS Institute, an independent organization, plans to organize the Network Attack Competition, which challenges students to find and exploit vulnerabilities in software, compromise enemy systems and steal data. Talented entrants may be recruited for cyber training camps planned for summer 2010, nonprofit camps run by the military and funded in part by private companies, or internships at agencies including the National Security Agency, the Department of Energy or Carnegie Mellon's Computer Emergency Response Team.'"
It's pointless to "study" computer security. By the time you're through, you get told "forget everything, it's outdated".
You're looking at a field here that reinvents itself every other month. What you knew 2 years ago is outdated and very near worthless today. 2 years ago, the big craze in security were bogus browser plugins and runtime packers. Nobody does it anymore, all security tools can easily identify and depack them. The thing now is the transition to true P2P updatable malware with digital signatures. Once this is achived, conficker will look like a toy.
Personally, I give it 3-6 months.
So it's not a matter of mindset. It's a matter of being outdated by the time you learned it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They don't want black hats. They're unreliable. Above skill comes the problem that they will deal with sensitive data which must not fall into the wrong hands. Their worst fear is to make the fox guard the chicken pen.
I hear you, though. It's an old joke in the biz, there's good people, there's clean people and there's available people. You may pick two of the list.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Sounds like someone is in love with mythical hackers that don't truly exist or are an extreme rarity.
The idea that the coding and all the underlying skills necessary to "hack" into any system is not teachable is what is laughable. You clearly weren't involved in 2600 if you think there weren't any professors involved. It's mostly academia where all of these people came from. They learned the computing skills in school and took the material above and beyond to try different tasks with the same tools.
My 2600 chapter was full of people from varying backgrounds and professions with a common interest in learning how to do things that others didn't know how to do.
If you know an infosec guy that doesn't know about hacking techniques then I pray for anyone that hires them as they will not be affective at all in their job. How are you supposed to guard against something you know nothing about? The term hacker existed before security researcher because hacker became stigmatized for the few like Kevin Mitnick who caused a lot of havoc and exposed a lot of utter stupidity.
The government is having a hard time finding hackers because most hackers are performing tasks which the government has deemed illegal. This does not a good relationship make. Combine this with the secret nature of a lot of hackers work and they simply don't want to be around authority unless they have just started out. Competitions like this are a way to attempt to change that image but unfortunately with the state of laws nothing will change especially with hackers that try to do the right thing by informing private parties of security vulnerabilities ending up in jail.
Millions of wannabe kids have other interests than computers. The people with the necessary OCD to take it to a level of interest is a very small number of people who tend to be withdrawn from the mainstream making them hard to find and more importantly volunteer to have your background checked.
I was part of Infragard in college until 9/11 happened it was mostly free to all who wanted to learn about infosec from a private infrastructure security standpoint and it was very eye opening. That is until the FBI did a background check after 9/11 and apparently I failed as they asked me not to come back until I had a job in the field even though I had contributed heavily with designing secure networks.
There are tons of books that "hackers" read to learn what they know and the rest is left up to creativity. Make no mistake, the vast majority of skills can and often are taught. My college degree back in 2004 had a network security major along with network engineer and both required a certain amount of programming so you understand what you're trying to manage. Many of those classes were very enlightening even though the real world was dramatically different it still gave me the tools to understand what was happening in real time.