‘Ethical hacking’ taught at training camps

By Isabelle Chaize

A new generation of hackers are being specially trained by companies like InfoSec Institute.

They are being taught how to hack into IT systems in order to understand how genuine cyber criminals gain access, and so to better prevent them from infiltrating companies’ systems.

The InfoSec Institute is a US training organisation based in Illinois, one of nearly 500 such training camps worldwide.

Once a potential ‘ethical hacker’ has completed the course they receive official accreditation from the EC-Council (The International Council for Electronic Commerce Consultants).

There are about 40 opportunities each year to join a course at InfoSec, each class taking on about 15 or 20 students.

So far over 11,000 people have received the official certificate, and according to Jack Koziol, an instructor at InfoSec, his class sizes have doubled over the past year.

“There used to be a big debate about whether anyone should even learn these skills,” Koziol said. “We were vilified. Now it’s more accepted.”

The growing popularity of these kinds of courses is down to the increasing threat to companies from hacking.

On average, a large American business was the victim of around 150,000 malicious attacks from hackers in 2007, according to the Ponemon Institute, an American data-privacy think tank, with around 2000 of those attacks seen to be serious enough to cause a potential data leak.