Ethical hacking ?!

Students learn 'ethical hacking'
Saturday, November 21, 2009 » 04:35am


Cyber attacks on businesses has led to a rapid increase in 'ethical hacking' courses at universities.


The threat of cyber attacks on businesses and governments has led to a rapid increase in the number of universities offering students the chance to learn how to hack computer networks.

The degrees have been set to feed the expanding industry of 'ethical hacking', in which companies pay hackers to infiltrate their systems and expose weaknesses.

The prospect of a lucrative career in the security services, police, defence and IT industries has fuelled the popularity in the courses, with hundreds of undergraduates and graduate students already enrolled.

The ethical hacking degree at Abertay University in Dundee was set up in 2006 and was the first of its kind in the UK.

Since then, other courses have been set up at Coventry, Northumbria and Sunderland, with more in the pipeline at Glasgow Caledonian, Edinburgh Napier and Leeds Metropolitan amongst others.

Colin McLean, the programme tutor in Ethical Hacking and Countermeasures at Abertay, told Sky News that teaching his students to hack networks means they will have the skills to protect banks, businesses and the critical national infrastructure against cyber attacks.

'The current people in those jobs are not protecting against hackers,' he said.

'There should be jobs for people who know exactly what hackers are doing and obviously how to stop the hackers as well.'

Critics have warned of the dangers of arming young people with knowledge that could so easily be turned to criminal endeavour.

But, according to Jennifer Higgins, a fourth year undergraduate on Abertay, the boundaries are clear.

'Take, for example, chemistry students,' she says.

'They might know all the chemicals to cause damage but that's not the sort of thing they're interested it, they're interested in putting their knowledge to the greater good.

'You're well educated on the laws and the way people detect things.'

'It's not made to seem glamorous to hack into anything, it's more about protecting the systems.'

The Government claims cyber crime costs the UK economy billions of pounds every year and recently set up its own Office for Cyber Security.

However, the increasing demand has also made ethical hacking one of the UK's fastest growing industries in the private sector.

NCC group, based in Manchester, is one of the largest firms in Europe to offer ethical hacking as one of its services, claiming to have 94 of the UK's top 100 companies amongs its clients.

Chief executive Rob Cotton said the importance of ethical hacking has yet to be fully realised.

'It's actually an arms race. It's the bad guys getting better and better and us, the good guys, trying to overcome them,' he said.

'Business is becoming more aware of it but more often than not organisations turn round and are shocked that they've been hacked.'

''Why would somebody hack us and steal our information', they say? Simple reason is information is valuable, and becoming more valuable as every day passes by.'

With both the private and public sectors increasingly dependent on networked technology, the promise of a lucrative career waging war against criminal hackers is likely to make the ethical option even more mainstream.