A Hacker's Perspective on Educating Future Security Experts

Information Systems Security experts should be able to confront new, unknown threats. Therefore, "out-of-the-box" thinking is a necessary skill which can not be taught using traditional educational methodologies. In order to introduce our students into the mentality of modern adversaries and cyber criminals we designed a course based on the well-established theoretical frameworks of Information Systems Security as well as the unconventional challenges which experienced hackers use for training newcomers. Moreover, we developed additional open source software tools which encourage the collaboration between students and confront plagiarism or cheating attempts during the exams. Our course in a Higher Education Institute has been enriched with the use of the Hackademic tool, a virtual framework that allows students to perform hacking attacks and penetration testing in a deliberately vulnerable, but isolated, safe and controlled environment.