Teach your kids to cheat. They might become security experts.

[SteveRiley]

Saw this on LWN; very worthy of sharing.

Teach yourself and your students to cheat. We’ve always been taught to color inside the lines, stick to the rules, and never, ever, cheat. In seeking cyber security, we must drop that mindset. It is difficult to defeat a creative and determined adversary who must find only a single flaw among myriad defensive measures to be successful. We must not tie our hands, and our intellects, at the same time. If we truly wish to create the best possible information security professionals, being able to think like an adversary is an essential skill. Cheating exercises provide long term remembrance, teach students how to effectively evaluate a system, and motivate them to think imaginatively. Cheating will challenge students’ assumptions about security and the trust models they envision. Some will find the process uncomfortable. That is OK and by design.

Embracing the Kobayashi Maru: Why You Should Teach Your Students to Cheat (pdf)

[HalationEffect]

Having taught one's children to cheat, I think it imperative to also teach them one other thing: that with great power comes great responsibility. (Hat-tip to Stan Lee)

They must only use their powers for good!

[whatthefunk]

Yeah, I was thinking theyd either end up security experts or prisoners.

[GreyGeek]

Knowing HOW to cheat isn't the same thing as cheating.

I know how to make most chemical explosives (and have made quite a few), but I'd never set off a bomb to do damage to people or property. (And if you follow the recopies in the "Jolly Rodger Cookbook" you going to blow your head off!)

[whatthefunk]

How do you teach kids to cheat without giving them the experience of cheating? You can make explosives and not detonate them and be perfectly within the law, but you cant cheat on anything real and be lawful...if it was lawful it wouldnt be cheating.

[GreyGeek]

By teaching them HOW cheaters cheat, and setting up simulations to demo the methods. Learning how to shoot a gun doesn't mean you have to use live targets!

[whatthefunk]

Seems like a lot of effort for little reward. The odds of any kid becoming any particular job are near zero. Making a serious effort to teach them how to cheat just doesnt seem worth it to me. Id rather teach them how to play baseball or something...

[GreyGeek]

The reward isn't in knowing how to cheat. It is in being able to spot cheating and not become a victim of it.

[SteveRiley]

The ability to recognize scams and cheating is very important. Witness the continual success of scams, online and off -- if people were more attuned to the techniques, scams would be far less successful.

I've run classes where I staged mock social engineering experiments. Not with the intention to teach people how to do this (although keen observers would probably understand how to adapt what they've learned and put it into practive), but instead as a way to innoculate people against becoming victims themselves.

[woodsmoke]

The ATF/FBI people who look for counterfeit money are trained only on REAL bills....thus they instantly recognise something that is false.

food for thought in that.

woodsmoke