Recruiting young hackers to public service

Reposted from the NY Times:

Luring Young Web Warriors Is a Priority. It’s Also a Game.

Mary Newman

Virginia high school students competed in a digital defense simulation at the Virginia Governor’s Cup Cyber Challenge at George Mason University.

By NICOLE PERLROTH

 WASHINGTON — In the eighth grade, Arlan Jaska figured out how to write a simple script that could switch his keyboard’s Caps Lock key on and off 6,000 times a minute. When friends weren’t looking, he slipped his program onto their computers. It was all fun and games until the program spread to his middle school.

“They called my parents and told my dad I was hacking their computers,” Mr. Jaska, 17 years old, recalled. He was grounded and got detention. And he is just the type the Department of Homeland Security is looking for.

The secretary of that agency, Janet Napolitano, knows she has a problem that will only worsen. Foreign hackers have been attacking her agency’s computer systems. They have also been busy trying to siphon the nation’s wealth and steal valuable trade secrets. And they have begun probing the nation’s infrastructure — the power grid, and water and transportation systems.

So she needs her own hackers — 600, the agency estimates. But potential recruits with the right skills have too often been heading for business, and those who do choose government work often go to the National Security Agency, where they work on offensive digital strategies. At Homeland Security, the emphasis is on keeping hackers out, or playing defense.

“We have to show them how cool and exciting this is,” said Ed Skoudis, one of the nation’s top computer security trainers. “And we have to show them that applying these skills to the public sector is important.”
One answer? Start young, and make it a game, even a contest.

This month, Mr. Jaska and his classmate Collin Berman took top spots at the Virginia Governor’s Cup Cyber Challenge, a veritable smackdown of hacking for high school students that was the brainchild of Alan Paller, a security expert, and others in the field.

With military exercises like NetWars, the competition had more the feel of a video game. Mr. Paller helped create the competition, the first in a series, to help Homeland Security, and likens the agency’s need for hackers to the shortage of fighter pilots during World War II.

The job calls for a certain maverick attitude. “I like to break things,” Mr. Berman, 18, said. “I always want to know, ‘How can I change this so it does something else?’ ”

It’s a far different pursuit — and a higher-minded one, enlightened hackers will say — than simply defacing Web sites.

“You want people who ask: How do things work? But the very best ones turn it around,” said Mr. Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute, a computer security training organization.

It’s no coincidence that the idea of using competitions came, in part, from China, where the People’s Liberation Army runs challenges every spring to identify its next generation of digital warriors.

Tan Dailin, a graduate student, won several of the events in 2005. Soon afterward he put his skills to work and was caught breaking into the Pentagon’s network and sending reams of documents back to servers in China.

“We have no program like that in the United States — nothing,” Mr. Paller said. “No one is even teaching this in schools. If we don’t solve this problem, we’re in trouble.”

At Northern Virginia’s acclaimed Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, which both Mr. Jaska and Mr. Berman attend, there are five computer science teachers, but none focused on security.
When eight students expressed interest in starting a security club, they had to persuade a Raytheon employee to meet with them once a week. (One idea for a name, the Hacking Club, didn’t last.

“We don’t want people who are going to go around defacing sites,” Mr. Berman said. They recently rebranded from the Cybersecurity Club to the Computer Security Club. The group dropped the “Cyber” because “it sounds like you’re trying to be cool but you’re not,” clarified Mr. Jaska.)

Mr. Jaska and Mr. Berman heard about the Virginia competition through their school. To qualify, they had to identify bad passwords and clean up security settings — a long way from a Caps Lock program.
Some 700 students from 110 Virginia high schools applied, but only 40, including Mr. Jaska and Mr. Berman, made the cut.

So, three weeks ago, the pair traveled to the Governor’s Cup Cyber Challenge at George Mason University.
There, they found something they rarely encounter in high school — a thriving community of like-minded teenagers, the best and brightest of a highly specialized task. 

(Continued)Published: March 24, 2013    

Where the Jobs Are - John McCrea

By NVTC member John McCrea published in Barron's Online:

Other Voices

Where the Jobs Are

By JOHN P. MCCREA | MORE ARTICLES BY AUTHOR

Why aren't colleges and universities educating students for the modern economy? The president of an information-technology search and consulting firm explains.

I interviewed an interesting job candidate recently. He was interesting, well, like a car wreck. It's always instructive to look at a disaster, especially if you want to avoid one.

I run an information-technology search and consulting firm in Reston, Va., called Achieve-it. The job candidate was a top-20 law school graduate—I'll call him Mr. Overqualified, Esq.—who was applying for an entry-level information-technology job in the Washington, D.C., area. He was debt-ridden and desperate for work, but it wasn't because he was unemployable. He arrived in our offices well dressed, had a professional manner, and actually arrived on time.

The ad he responded to asked only for a B.S. in a hard science and an aptitude with computers. So we were perplexed by his application, because not only did he have a J.D. from a top-20 law school, but he had already passed the state bar exam. He was more qualified to sue us than petition us for employment, especially for the job we had open. And that's where the scary part comes in: Why would a guy with this pedigreed education apply for an entry-level job paying $20 an hour?

YOU KNOW THE ANSWER, of course: He has over $100,000 in student-loan debt. To hold it together for the moment, he was working as an Excel jock for a local firm and living with his parents. He was earning $8 an hour. When Mr. Overqualified stepped off the graduation stage at his law school, he might as well have been stepping off a cliff.

Dan Picasso for Barron's

When workers emerge from their initial education and find jobs, they'll soon learn what skills can drive their careers forward; that's the time for graduate school or further training courses.

At least he was using his tech skills; he could have been earning the same amount slinging burgers at McDonald's. Mr. Overqualified told us that yes, he regretted the time he wasted in law school; he wondered if he could ever pay off his student debt. Lawyering was once a reliable route to a big house, a nice car, and a productive life. Now Mr. Overqualified can't even find the on ramp to the middle class.

I have employed more than 2,000 IT professionals in my career, so I know what it takes to get that first job, and more importantly how to grow skill sets so you can keep a job in our IT-driven economy. The technology and our economy change rapidly; our best candidates are using on-the-job training, and supplemental education, to keep pace. At Achieve-it, we listen very carefully to what our clients are demanding today and anticipating for tomorrow. Clients will tell you—but you have to carefully listen and then react. Education—the system that so spectacularly failed Mr. Overqualified—is only a starting point. It is not the end game. The goal is to get and keep a job that pays sustainable wages and puts workers on the road to future growth.

ALL IS NOT LOST for Mr. Overqualified. Even though he didn't think of it as vocational education, he had learned computer skills on his own in high school, and actually taught some IT classes in college. While he was wasting time and money learning jurisprudence, he kept his programming and Excel skills strong via self-study. Note the irony here: The only education system that actually worked for him was the self-education kind. And it is what is going to help him work his way into the highest-paying career.

His top-20 law school and private education in general are not to blame; they're in the business (yes, the business) of providing a service that's in demand, no matter how misinformed their "customers" may be. If you've got foolish customers who will overpay for something worthless, who's really to blame? Oh, right, the institutions that hand them the money, at high rates of interest, so they can buy the goods—law degrees, for instance—that won't work for them. Cheap financing of education can put a young life underwater, just as junk loans for McMansions did in the housing market, where older lives were put underwater. Too much debt, too little equity in the product itself: the worker or the house.

The current administration has pursued a cheap-money approach to student loans in order to produce as many four-year-degree students (and not always graduates) as possible. Instead, the goal should be to assess which schools and degrees can be the quickest to bring well-trained workers to market. When workers emerge from their initial education and find jobs, they'll soon learn what skills can drive their careers forward; that's the time for graduate school or further training courses. That's when speculation turns into investment: a known need, and then a wise outlay to meet it. Our economy needs the most cost-effective education/hire ratio possible, and we should also measure retention to make sure schools are meeting needs. Mr. Overqualified trusted that his expensive education was an investment; instead, it was a fraud. Let's stop this nonsense.

In addition to funding just-in-time skills education, the federal government also should make credit easier for small businesses. Here at Achieve-it, we're lucky enough to have excellent personal and corporate credit, but our local bank is willing to offer only a 7% line of credit to help us meet payroll and other business services. So the Fed is loaning to banks money at less than 1%, and the banks give small businesses—and only the best of those—an interest rate of 7%! And we wonder why the economy is stagnating.

SMALL BUSINESSES are responsible for 70% of the jobs created in the U.S. today. Shouldn't they be receiving the cheap loans, to encourage more job growth? And, in a related question, where are the graduates I need with the degrees and skills that will help grow my business and get the U.S economy back on track? Mr. Overqualified would like to know, too, since he's still in employment limbo. He has passed his preliminary interviews, but there are more to come.

Americans can only compete in the world economy if we have an accurate assessment of the skills that are needed for the jobs of today and tomorrow, and fund the cheapest and quickest ways to prepare students to step onto the playing field.

In fact, at age 20, Mr. Overqualified had already built the skills he needed for today's economy largely through self-study. Had he come into my office then, the $20 an hour he might have secured would be a bonus on top of the work experience that would have been his true education. Once you're in the game, you can add skills to keep playing.

JOHN P. MCCREA is president of Achieve-it, whose Website is achieve-it.jobs.

Heineken Interview

For the weekend, here's a viral video about interviewing with Heineken: