From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

How can we educate people about hacking?

From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

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How can we educate people about hacking?

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(upbeat music) - So, in my opinion, the greatest vulnerability around security that we have right now is the way we train people. Most people think it's the hole in the system that we have. It's actually holes we're about to create. It's unbelievable to me that most of the time when you get trained in a technology, you take database design or another system design, we don't talk about the way the system is going to be attacked. When you submit, you know, a homework exercise in computer science, there's usually a program that is testing it to see if it gives the right answer. Nowhere in there does the test try to attack the system and see if there's a flaw of getting in there. So, you don't ever get taught as you're learning to build how people are trying to break your stuff. A good one is a version of this, which is if you're being taught how to build a bridge, how do you get taught that what happens if someone tries to blow up a bomb on the bridge to make sure the bridge still stays up? You know, that's a critical thing to be thinking about when you're thinking about digital infrastructure with the ways people are trying to attack you. So, where do people learn it? Oftentimes, you have to learn it as an elective. A separate class. If you're an electrical engineer working on something around the internet of things or building a sensor to control a dam, you might never actually learn it. So, you built this system that can't be updated and has a hole. As we're getting to an increasingly digital world, we have to be asking the question of how do the people that actually build these systems, how do they have the thinking and mental mindset of what security is? Just like we say design thinking, we need to have design thinking include defensive security thinking because design thinking is about keeping a user's data safe, as well. We can't just say, how does this benefit you? We have to ask, how is this potentially harming you? And security is, in the Maslow's Hierarchy of the world, of food, clothing, water, shelter, that is the base, and then there's many other ethical questions of use of data but if we can't start about keeping the data safe, we can't even begin the discussion. (upbeat music)

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