#High school story hack iphone how to

“They were having excited conversations about arcane technical issues - something they never get to do - and their parents exalted in it.” “For some of the kids, who tended to be a little bit loners, this was the first time they had a peer group,” Mr. There, they found something they rarely encounter in high school - a thriving community of like-minded teenagers, the best and brightest of a highly specialized task. So, three weeks ago, the pair traveled to the Governor’s Cup Cyber Challenge at George Mason University. Some 700 students from 110 Virginia high schools applied, but only 40, including Mr. To qualify, they had to identify bad passwords and clean up security settings - a long way from a Caps Lock program. Berman heard about the Virginia competition through their school. The group dropped the “Cyber” because “it sounds like you’re trying to be cool but you’re not,” clarified Mr. They recently rebranded from the Cybersecurity Club to the Computer Security Club. “We don’t want people who are going to go around defacing sites,” Mr. (One idea for a name, the Hacking Club, didn’t last. When eight students expressed interest in starting a security club, they had to persuade a Raytheon employee to meet with them once a week. Berman attend, there are five computer science teachers, but none focused on security. If we don’t solve this problem, we’re in trouble.”Īt Northern Virginia’s acclaimed Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, which both Mr. “No one is even teaching this in schools. “We have no program like that in the United States - nothing,” Mr. Soon afterward he put his skills to work and was caught breaking into the Pentagon’s network and sending reams of documents back to servers in China. Tan Dailin, a graduate student, won several of the events in 2005. It’s no coincidence that the idea of using competitions came, in part, from China, where the People’s Liberation Army runs challenges every spring to identify its next generation of digital warriors. Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute, a computer security training organization. “You want people who ask: How do things work? But the very best ones turn it around,” said Mr.

It’s a far different pursuit - and a higher-minded one, enlightened hackers will say - than simply defacing Web sites. “I always want to know, ‘How can I change this so it does something else?’ ” The job calls for a certain maverick attitude. Paller helped create Cyber Aces, the nonprofit group that was host of the competition, to help Homeland Security, and likens the agency’s need for hackers to the shortage of fighter pilots during World War II. With military exercises like NetWars, the competition, the first in a series, had more the feel of a video game. Jaska and his classmate Collin Berman took top spots at the Virginia Governor’s Cup Cyber Challenge, a veritable smackdown of hacking for high school students that was the brainchild of Alan Paller, a security expert, and others in the field. One answer? Start young, and make it a game, even a contest. “And we have to show them that applying these skills to the public sector is important.” “We have to show them how cool and exciting this is,” said Ed Skoudis, one of the nation’s top computer security trainers. At Homeland Security, the emphasis is on keeping hackers out, or playing defense. But potential recruits with the right skills have too often been heading for business, and those who do choose government work often go to the National Security Agency, where they work on offensive digital strategies. So she needs her own hackers - 600, the agency estimates. And they have begun probing the nation’s infrastructure - the power grid, and water and transportation systems. They have also been busy trying to siphon the nation’s wealth and steal valuable trade secrets.

Foreign hackers have been attacking her agency’s computer systems.

The secretary of that agency, Janet Napolitano, knows she has a problem that will only worsen. And he is just the type the Department of Homeland Security is looking for. “They called my parents and told my dad I was hacking their computers,” Mr. It was all fun and games until the program spread to his middle school. When friends weren’t looking, he slipped his program onto their computers.

#High school story hack iphone how to

WASHINGTON - In the eighth grade, Arlan Jaska figured out how to write a simple script that could switch his keyboard’s Caps Lock key on and off 6,000 times a minute.