Como muchos de Uds. saben desde hace 7 años venimos desarrollando el programa HHS de ISECOM.

Hoy publicamos una nota de Pete Herzog que salió en OpenSource.com y que explica los alcances y motivaciones de este programa de formación, esperamos que les resulte esclarecedora:

It might sound strange, but every industry and profession could benefit from an employee as creative, resourceful, and motivated as a hacker. Hackers can teach themselves how things work and how groups of things work together. Hackers know how to modify things—to adjust, personalize, and even improve them. And it is the hacker whose skillset is diverse, unique, and powerful enough to be dangerous in the hands of the wrong person. Enter ISECOM—a non-profit, open source research group focused on next-generation security and professional security development and accreditation—and its popular project, Hacker Highschool.

Studies have shown that an amateur in any particular field is most likely to entertain the self-delusion that he knows enough to master it. But once he gets some professional training, he begins to understand that learning is a continuous process and no one ever “knows it all.” A similar but more targeted study by ISECOM and the United Nations UNICRI, called the Hacker Profiling Project, shows it’s amateur hackers who do the most damage out of carelessness.

We know how important it is to show teen hackers how to gain knowledge and skills so as to move beyond the amateur level. We need to get teens to realize how small they are in the bigger world of hacking. We just need a way to do it responsibly. We figured if we could properly introduce the world of hacking to teenagers we could make them safer online, as well as open up new ways of thinking and the resourcefulness necessary to enhance any profession they find themselves in some day.

Hackers unite

Our main focus was to teach junior high and highschool students (and their teachers). The project became known as Hacker Highschool and now offers license-free, security and privacy awareness teaching materials that students can follow on their own without the need of extra instruction from professionals or teachers.

We craft lessons to work with any free “live Linux” CD, which will boot off a PC with a CD-ROM drive, to perform the lessons. Additionally, we provide access to an Internet-based test lab built and maintained specifically for Hacker Highschool.

Here’s the curriculum we provide teachers as a supplement to student course work or as part of after-school and club activities:

01 Being a Hacker
02 Basic Commands in Windows, Linux and OSX
03 Ports and Protocols
04 Services and Connections
05 System Identification
06 Malware
07 Attack Analysis
08 Digital Forensics
09 E-mail Security and Privacy
10 Web Security and Privacy
11 Passwords
12 Internet Legalities and Ethics
13 Cloud Computing
14 Databases
15 Document Grinding
16 Vulnerabilities and Exploits
17 Mobile Phones
18 Physical Security
19 Wireless Security
20 Social Engineering
21 Hacktivism

We began teaching it formally as lessons and workbooks to high school students, taking advantage of studies showing how teenagers learn and how hackers figure things out. The truth was, more and more teens were coming online but were unprepared for what was out there: scammers, malware, thieves, bullies, and unethical businesses. And some teens were already finding out how insecure things were by using hacking tools and tips disseminated by newsgroups, chat, and public websites.

So, while motivation for these teens to teach themselves was great, the information they got was inconsistent and often far from accurate. It was time to teach them the right way (or else they’d have a hard time reliably securing themselves in the future and probably end up doing more damage). We gave them a safe environment—a group of vulnerable servers on which to test their new knowledge without hurting anyone.

Para leer el resto del artículo: http://opensource.com/life/12/8/hacker-highschool-students-learn-redesign-future