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DARPA Training Cadets and Midshipmen As Cyber Warriors
An anonymous reader writes "DARPA officials say the Defense Department must train 4,000 cybersecurity experts by 2017. Meeting that goal requires building a pipeline for training and education, especially for future officers who'll oversee protection of the cyber domain. During a winter weekend in Pittsburgh, more than 50 cadets and midshipmen from three service academies sat elbow to elbow at nine round tables in a packed room. They'd been training since November to compete in a pilot program of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency called the Service Academy Cyber Stakes. From the article: 'This involves skills such as being able to reverse engineer binary, or machine-readable, files and, Ragsdale said, finding source-code-level vulnerabilities that could be exploited, and doing so with software source-level analysis and with automated tools that perform functions such as fuzzing, the informal name for automatic bug finding."
I hope they will offer pay equivalent to the skill level they seek.
While not mutually exclusive, they are not convergent in training.
So you cannot, usually, take the average military academy cadet and include some programming classes and some network security classes and expect to get an officer who is competent in computer security.
The exceptions being those cadets who were already programming while they were in high school (or earlier).
The problem with those early programmers is that they were immature kids back then so many of them will be excluded from the academies because of broken laws or group associations.
For the same reasons you won't find real hackers in the police force, you won't find them anytime soon in the military either. The best hackers don't do it for political reasons, they do it because they enjoy a challenge. Generally, hackers tend to hate warmongers AFAIK.
I've never ever encountered a REAL knowledgeable hacker in the police force, not even in their cybercrime division. This is due to the fact that most of them, are schoolboys who have a degree in computer science & programming...unfortunately - the most difficult stuff, can't be taught in classes, this comes from YEARS of actual real-life practice and experience.
I do believe NSA have some serious badboys working for them however, but these are probably semi-skilled hackers who bragged too much, made a few mistakes - and are held captive by their own past. But you'll never ever find the best ones, because they don't brag about their achievements.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
We need to kill the dumbass myth that the best programmers started when they're in diapers. The exception isn't the kid who've been making simple games for the last 6 years before academy or college, that's simply a kid who has 6 years more experience with loops, conditionals, and a handful of calls that can draw sprites onto the screen. A good student should be able to understand and properly apply those concepts in a few months and now their at the same level here. A great student is one who knows how to learn things that have not been taught to him. While the kid who taught himself programming in middle-school has this attribute, he's not the only one in the world who does.
They didn't start "in diapers". They are the ones that have put a couple thousand hours in already.
I think that the easiest counter to that is the Linux kernel and the people who have been working on that for more than a two decades.
There is no way that someone with "a few months" of classes is anywhere near Linus (or the rest) in terms of skill.
There is something to be said for an "expert" being someone who has done something for 10,000 hours.
Why not focus those efforts on helping secure platforms from those same techniques? You know, so we can help avoid the next Target debacle and the economic damages that come with it. I know it's not as sexy, but it will be better for everyone.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
The first problem is that their recruitment/training policies aren't designed for that.
Stephen Hawking would have difficult time being accepted to any military academy.
The NSA does not discriminate on whether you can pass a physical fitness test. Stephen Hawking, were he so inclined, would probably at least get an interview there.
It's not that you cannot have a physically fit hacker. They do exist.
But when the recruitment criteria STARTS with physical capabilities, then you have problems because you're reducing the pool of applicants on the WRONG criteria.