Rehab camp aims to put young cyber-crooks on right track | Hacker News Reader

Rehab camp aims to put young cyber-crooks on right track

bbc.co.uk

21 pointsancarda6 comments

I actually work with someone who was involved with the precursor to this program, which didn't involve any direct training or bootcamp. After reporting a security issue in a big banks app he received an email with a quite humourous quote: "you are on the precipice of cyber crime". The short of it is they hooked him up with an internship at a cyber security consultancy.

So I'm pleased they are taking more proactive steps like offering a bootcamp where before they would done something stupid and got the law involved. There is a big shortage of people with these skills in the UK and I think it will get worse, not better after brexit, as Europeans fill quite a few of the positions.

How is finding an issue and reporting it "on the precipice of cyber crime?"

They probably did something illegal in order to get that far and know enough information to file the report. That they were doing it for good instead of evil is nice and all, but it's not that far to decide to start doing it for your own benefit. (Remember that there are laws against unauthorized access to computer systems.)

Scenario: College kid is upset that the admins have hidden the games on the college network. Kid snoops and finds that he can open other sections by changing a number. Kid changes the number a lot, and before he finds the games, he finds all the test questions and answers to the entire nursing program's exams.

Kid was only slightly tempted to do something with that info for profit. Kid did nothing and walked away. But that temptation was there, and it could have gone the other way.

That's the precipice of cyber-crime.

That is a true story, BTW.

Exactly.

> The two-day residential camp reinforced messages about using technical skills responsibly and called on industry professionals who gave talks about jobs in cyber-security. It had the air of a school trip as in that much of the fun was closely supervised and had an educational bent.

I wonder how many young hacker types would find this compelling.

http://i.imgur.com/9FsBXs6.gif

Reply on news.ycombinator.com