From Newsweek: College Teacher Shows Students How to Be Hackers.

Ledin compares the companies’ hold over antivirus technology (under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, the companies’ codes are kept secret) to cryptography decades ago, when the new science of scrambling data was largely controlled by the National Security Agency.

[. . .]

Why should we shy away from learning something that is important to everyone?,” Ledin asks. “Yes, you could inflict some damage on society, but you could inflict damage with chemistry and physics, too.”

Since the students are working on sandboxed networks, the most pernicious effect is the knowledge gleaned from the exercise. In a college setting, under the tutelage of a professor, knowledge is probably not a bad thing. The difference between college students reverse-engineering anti-virus software and malware authors doing so is that college students will probably disclose their findings instead of exploiting them.

IST’s own SRA and IA clubs already teach and demonstrate the same sort of hacking techniques, and both could benefit tremendously from having a sandboxed network for research. The mindset of network security should move away from the reactionary, hackers-strike-first solutions to more proactive research and consequently improved design.

Tags: club, hacking, ist, security, sra

Categories: News, Opinion, Suggestions