Harvard — the Next Source of Hacking Experts

Researchers at one of China’s top universities collaborated with a Chinese army unit accused of carrying out hacking attacks on the United States, academic papers published online show.

The elite Shanghai Jiaotong University conducted network security research with People’s Liberation Army Unit 61398, the co-authored papers accessed by AFP Sunday reveal.

A small cadre of the People’s Liberation Army has been identified as the group that launched major cyberattacks against U.S. interests.

The Associated Press has looked into the efforts by an American university to recruit high school students with cyber programming skills:

Carnegie Mellon University and one of the government’s top spy agencies want to interest high school students in a game of computer hacking.

Their goal with “Toaster Wars” is to cultivate the nation’s next generation of cyber warriors in offensive and defensive strategies. The free, online “high school hacking competition” will run from April 26 to May 6. Any U.S. student or team in grades six through 12 can apply.

The game is sponsored by the National Security Agency, which is responsible for code breaking and protecting the U.S. from cyberattack. NSA representative Vanee Vines said Friday that the U.S. increasingly needs professionals with highly technical cyber skills to help keep the country safe.

America’s other premier universities almost certainly have a large number of people with the skills already, if the moral compasses of these students can be turned toward national defense and away from their studies and planned futures.

Harvard and major West Coast universities have a decades long record of producing some of the nation’s top technical minds. This includes Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg from Harvard, and Google Inc.’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) founder Sergey Brin and Larry Page from Stanford. Google and most major tech companies continue to troll for programmers from the top universities, particularly those in California. People with the most advanced skills in these areas almost all go into the private sector, where they often have a good deal of freedom to explore new products and services and usually are paid generously.

Now that America needs the best programmers to thwart attacks from overseas, and perhaps mount attacks of its own, recruiting from the top universities to get soldiers is the best means to find experts — if only those people will leave the comforts of private enterprise to work as the equivalent of U.S. government spies, sort of like a Manhattan Project for the new age.