Hey, hackers: The NSA is out to get you. If you’re an American who can code malware to infiltrate a network, or snoop on SMS messages, or stop a distributed denial-of-service attack in your sleep, you’re a person of interest. Age is of little consequence. Location likewise. The NSA’s mission is simple: It’s trying to identify formidable hackers. But not to arrest them. To recruit them.
Despite all of the United States’ spending on defense, many experts say the country is still in a vulnerable position–to cyberattacks. According to General Keith Alexander of U.S. Cyber Command, a division of the Department of Defense, attacks on U.S. computer networks increased seventeen-fold between 2009 and 2011. To counter that threat, the U.S. is seeking cybersecurity experts with the chops to neutralize would-be online invaders. But rather than wait for hackers to reach out via LinkedIn, the NSA is being proactive: This fall, four universities–Dakota State, Northeastern, the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), and Tulsa–are launching NSA-designated cyber-operations curricula intended to fast-track students into security jobs. The goal is to create a pipeline of government-vetted talent and with it, a robust line of virtual national defense.
There’s no questioning, or avoiding, the growing danger posed by hackers. In 2012 alone, hackers have stolen hundreds of thousands of credit-card numbers from American banks. In all, estimates put the cost of cybercrime to businesses and government agencies at more than $100 billion annually–and that sum isn’t likely to shrink in the coming years. “We can do things to make it more costly to hack into our systems… but [security experts] didn’t say we can stop them,” Senator Rob Portman (R-Ohio) told the Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee in March 2012. Explains Cynthia Irvine, chair of the Cyber Academic Group at the NPS, “There is a mission-critical need for cyberwarriors.”
Starting in the 2012-13 school year, Irvine and her counterparts at the other universities will have the chance to train those soldiers. The pilot schools were selected from a pool of applicants based on their existing cyber-operations course offerings, which were then expanded to meet NSA requirements. “We’ve had these programs for years,” says Sujeet Shenoi, a professor of computer science at Tulsa, “but this is the first time a government agency has formalized it.”
