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:4, Insightful)
We need to kill the dumbass myth that the best programmers started when they're in diapers. The exception isn't the kid who've been making simple games for the last 6 years before academy or college, that's simply a kid who has 6 years more experience with loops, conditionals, and a handful of calls that can draw sprites onto the screen. A good student should be able to understand and properly apply those concepts in a few months and now their at the same level here. A great student is one who knows how to learn things that have not been taught to him. While the kid who taught himself programming in middle-school has this attribute, he's not the only one in the world who does.