It started with Michael Coppola taking things apart at the age of five: the remote control, his mother's house lamps, the family's VCR. He was curious about how things worked. By the time he was in fourth grade, he moved on to software. After building Web sites for his parents and their friends, Coppola, now 17, decided to try his hand at hacking. “When you have this passion for technology, you're not satisfied with knowing how to use something, you want to know how it works," he says. What started out as mere curiosity now makes this Connecticut high-school senior a rare and highly valued commodity: a hacker in the making. While billions of dollars are being spent to secure U.S. cyberspace, the number of elite cyber-security experts needed to protect and traffic this area for the government and the private sector is dangerously inadequate. The Comprehensive National Cyber-security Initiative (CNCI) launched by President George W. Bush lists the need for better cyber-education and more experts as part of 12 core initiatives, but its large-scale implementation will take time.
According to national-security authorities, time is something we don't really have. By one estimate the United States currently has about 1,000 elite experts. It needs 20,000. Until now, the formal recruiting and training of a national cybercorps has been haphazard at best. Fortunately, for the Michael Coppolas among us, private companies and government agencies are amping up their efforts to find and educate a new generation of cyber whiz kids. By sponsoring national cyber competitions akin to American Idol, the goal is to quickly bring at least 10,000 young tech minds into the fold. Among the organizers leading the way is Alan Paller, co-founder and research director of the Sans Institute, a cyber-security school.
Paller is kind of a real-life version of Professor Charles Xavier, the X-men comic-book character who heads a school designed to find and nurture young mutants with supernatural powers. Early in his career, he co-founded a major graphics company and was an original member of President Bill Clinton's National Infrastructure Assurance Council, which was setup to address threats to the country's critical infrastructure. Since then, the cyber veteran has invested about 20 years helping to mold some of the brightest cyber minds in the world at Sans, and in doing so, keeping their skills on the right side of the law. He only decided to co-host a cyber challenge in 2008, after meeting with computer-security leaders from the White House, the NSA, and other agencies. “Simply put, we find ourselves in the same situation we did during the 1950s and 1960s when we took on the space race," he says. “That [period] inspired young people to consider careers in math and science. Today, we need to approach cyber-security the same way."
To Paller, that means looking for talent in unconventional places.
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