Hacker high school?

[aTEK]

Please can you read the site before "flaming" me for posting this. I'm going to try and convince my ICT administrator to teach this (or let me) teach this course to several students at my school. However I was wondering if anybody could help me with convincing him. And any real reviews about the course or if i should find a different one. In short I want to educate people about security of computers, and try and get a larger interest in IT and How computers work. Hacker Highschool - www.hackerhighschool.org

 

I am going to talk to him on Monday with an outline of the course and then if he gives the go ahead I will need to create a presentation for SMT about it as an IT initiative.

 

Thanks

aTEK

[mrcrazy04]

Sounds like an interesting course.

I would however recommend you have a bullet proof AUP before you start, as well as make students aware (and sign to agree) that if they are caught doing anything illegal they will be subject to disciplinary action, and I'd suggest immediate removal from any hacking portions.

When I started the course I'm on at the moment (ethical hacking & countermeasures at Abertay) we had to agree to that, and not being allowed to learn any more is a good deterrent!

[EduTech]

You seem to want to do allot within your school... VLE.. now a Course to Teach

 

Looks very good though.. something to think about definitely!

 

 

James.

Edited November 29, 2008 by EduTech
Should of looked @ URL First :)

[powdarrmonkey]

I admire your intentions, but looking at the course content this isn't about hacking, it's about muddying cracking into some kind of ethical practice. Now, white hats do crack ethically, but they have advance prior permission, they don't just attack things so they can tell the owner.

 

All the course material could be taught in a techy context rather than an hacky one. You'll get people attending who want to learn, not want to break into places. You don't want to be responsible for breeding a group of script kiddies now, do you?

 

This still isn't hacking though, hacking is a broad term (see Eric's essay The New Hacker's Dictionary). Why don't you channel your efforts into something collaborative with a wider community, like one of the GNU/Linux distributions? We at debian, for example, are always after contributors who do so for the project's sake, rather than their egos.

[aTEK]

When I had an overview of the course it seemed to talk more about computer security and how it works. Yes it also discusses different techniques of breaking into systems but it also discusses ways to protect yourself from these attacks. I really think the Lesson to do with using google should be taught everywhere as me and my friends get so many questions where the answer is the top of the google search.

 

Thanks for the tip about looking into debian. I will come and see if there is anything that I like the look of later.

 

Edited November 29, 2008 by aTEK
Forgot to add something.

[dhicks]

I'm going to try and convince my ICT administrator to teach this (or let me) teach this course to several students at my school.

 

What is it you're actually hoping to achieve here? If you're hoping to increase your own, or your group of friends', own knowledge about IT security then there's no need to wait around for your teacher's approval, you don't have to frame the learning exercise in the context of a teacher-taught class, you can simply go and figure it out yourselves. Go and set up a couple of old machines in a small test network and figure out the myriad ways in which you can break into / out of them.

 

Personally, I think you might do better to concentrate on your current studies and wait until you get to university, where you'll find a greater proportion of like-minded people and have fewer constraints on you - heck, you can rent a house with all your mates, stuff it to the brim with PCs and cable and spend 24 hours a day trying to break into each other's systems.

 

While you're at school you get taught, for free. A how-to-hack-a-PC course isn't education so much as training in a particular skill - there's better things to be doing with your youthful enthusiasm for learning (and free access to teachers). I'd suggest maths, philosophy or a language - instead of a hacking group, start a lunchtime debating group or language workshop. If you're thinking of writing back to this post with anything along the lines of "but I don't like maths / philosophy / languages, I like computers" then this is exactly why you should be learning something else. I have a feeling you're bright enough to be able to go through the material in the Hacker High School course yourself in a few weeks, setting up a class for someone to teach the material to you might simply be a way of you getting a high mark in a course without having to do any hard work.

 

That said, you seemed willing to teach the class yourself, which is very laudable. You might, however, be surprised at how tricky this can be - it might take you a while to realise that other people aren't as bright as you when it comes to computers and that teaching is in itself a skill that needs practice. You would learn a lot from teaching this course. As has been pointed out, though, I have a nasty feeling you would be producing a new generation of script kiddies - people who maybe haven't quite grasped the same philosophy as you, who maybe can't simply figure it all out anyway given time as you can, and such a course would be simply handing them knowledge more sophisticated than is appropriate for them. You might want to consider teaching them something else instead - maybe even a certificate course like CompTIA:

 

IT Education Resources and Tools

 

You teach the material, then everyone pays to go to a test centre and do then test, and you all get a proper certificate and actual qualification at the end.

 

--

David Hicks