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You are here: News > News > Teenage Hackers for Hire by the Pentagon
| » IT Security NEWS |
| » 30 May 2009 |
| Teenage Hackers for Hire by the Pentagon |
| Is it a desperate move or a savvy one? At any rate, it's all true; Uncle Sam really is looking for code crackers, teenage hackers, and virtual deviants to help America win the looming cyberspace race. It's about time the programming expertise of America's geek population is finally put into good use. White House interim cyber security head Melissa Hathaway—one of the National Security Council's senior officials—will likely bring up sooner or later this month a groundbreaking, military-funded project focused on finally taking advantage of an untapped human resource: America's large population of Star-Trek-watching, jargon-speaking, and socially inept high school and college geeks. Trite Hollywood Nerd clichés aside, the Cyber Challenge was developed to create three nationwide examinations for high school and college students that are aimed at nurturing and promulgating the development of a young generation of cyber security experts. The competitions will examine skills needed by both the private industry and the government: stealing information from a protected database, attacking and defending virtual targets, and tracing the whereabouts and methods employed by other hackers to steal data. The contests operate a step beyond educational-level academics as well, as demonstrated by the Air Forces' Cyber Patriot contest that's focused on defending networks and warding off hackers trying to steal data from the other contestants' system. That's really not unlike the first-person shooter game "Counterstrike", except the competition is "played" in terms of hacking abilities instead of gaming ones. Meanwhile, the SANS (SysAdmin, Audit, Networking, and Security) Institute, a computer security training school and independent organization, is arranging to coordinate what may be the most infamous of the cyber competitions: the Network Attack Competition, which dares students to look for and take advantage of system vulnerabilities in software, steal data, and compromise competing systems. In essence, it acts like a practical exam for would-be hackers. Furthermore, the Defense Department's Cyber Crime Center will expand its three-year-old Digital Forensics Challenge to include high school and college students as well, testing them with cyber tracking problems like rebuilding partial data sources and finding the origins of digital breaches. This test is perfect for would-be Symantec/McAfee/Trend Micro security researchers. There's a lot more up for grabs in these geek contests than mere bragging rights. Successful participants and prodigy-like talents will be hired for non-profit, military-run, and company-funded cyber training camps already penciled in to commence in the summer of 2010. They can also be brought to internships at agencies that include Carnegie Mellon's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), the Department of Energy, or the National Security Agency (NSA). |
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