Conference · 2011
A Hacker's Perspective on Educating Future Security Experts
Alexandros Papanikolaou, Vassilios Karakoidas, Vasileios Vlachos, Andreas Venieris, Christos Ilioudis, Georgios Zouganelis
A security course built around the way experienced hackers train newcomers, on the argument that the out-of-the-box thinking security work demands is not something a conventional syllabus teaches.
- Published in
- Proceedings of 15th Panhellenic Conference on Informatics (PCI 2011), 2011
- Citations
- 15 on Google Scholar, read 5 September 2026 — 13 of 30 by count
- Cite as
- PKV+10
The idea
Security experts have to deal with threats nobody has described yet, which is a habit of mind rather than a body of knowledge — and traditional teaching methods are poor at instilling it. The course described here keeps the established theoretical frameworks of information systems security and adds the unconventional challenges that hacking communities use to bring newcomers on.
What it describes
- The design of the course itself, and how the challenge-based material sits alongside the theory.
- Its delivery in a higher education institution using Hackademic, a virtual framework in which students carry out attacks and penetration testing against deliberately vulnerable targets, isolated and under control.
- Open-source tooling the authors wrote to go with it — encouraging collaboration between students while making plagiarism and cheating during examinations harder.
Written from the published abstract; the paper is behind the DOI above, and the copy that could be reached is a scan with no extractable text.