UK gets first 'hacking' training course

The organisers of the UK's first 'ethical' hacking training course claim strict screening processes will prevent any aspiring 'black hat' or malicious hackers from using it to improve their skills for hacking corporate networks.

The intensive five-day course is instead aimed squarely at helping IT staff better secure their own networks by teaching them the tools and methods that hackers use against them.

The EC-Council-recognised Certified Ethical Hacker course is being run by the Training Camp from April and will teach IT professionals how to scan their own networks for vulnerabilities and then attack them using the software tools and social engineering employed by the hacker community.

Apart from having a spare few thousand quid to get on the course, students must also have at least two years of IT security experience, a working knowledge of TCP/IP and familiarity with both the Windows and Linux environment.

Robert Chapman, co-founder of the Training Camp, said there has been a huge amount of interest, with about 30 queries a day about the course.

"We can take a competent network administrator and show him the type of tool that people who try to attack him use," he said. "It means they can approach their own network to find where vulnerabilities are. It is what hackers actually do that you need to know."