DARPA Training Cadets and Midshipmen As Cyber Warriors 65
An anonymous reader writes "DARPA officials say the Defense Department must train 4,000 cybersecurity experts by 2017. Meeting that goal requires building a pipeline for training and education, especially for future officers who'll oversee protection of the cyber domain. During a winter weekend in Pittsburgh, more than 50 cadets and midshipmen from three service academies sat elbow to elbow at nine round tables in a packed room. They'd been training since November to compete in a pilot program of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency called the Service Academy Cyber Stakes. From the article: 'This involves skills such as being able to reverse engineer binary, or machine-readable, files and, Ragsdale said, finding source-code-level vulnerabilities that could be exploited, and doing so with software source-level analysis and with automated tools that perform functions such as fuzzing, the informal name for automatic bug finding."
Re:warriors or experts? (Score:5, Informative)
While not mutually exclusive, they are not convergent in training.
So you cannot, usually, take the average military academy cadet and include some programming classes and some network security classes and expect to get an officer who is competent in computer security.
The exceptions being those cadets who were already programming while they were in high school (or earlier).
The problem with those early programmers is that they were immature kids back then so many of them will be excluded from the academies because of broken laws or group associations.