How to teach students think like hackers?

Learning cybersecurity is one of the essential steps to become a real expert in modern technologies, computing, and software development. Teachers are trying different methods to make their learners find vulnerabilities and weak points in any software. Although it is difficult to teach your student to think like a hacker, there are some hints on how to make your job easier. Below we’ve collected some techniques on how to make learners think like hackers and boost their knowledge in cybersecurity.

Initiate More Classroom Activities

There is nothing new that lots of learners are constantly looking for answers to the question “Can I pay someone to do my homework?” as well as “Is papercoach.net the most affordable service for buying essays? First of all, you need to understand that these platforms are not hackers. The second thing you should definitely know is that these services are widely used by thousands of students. Therefore, it is important to focus on teaching cybersecurity in the classroom rather than include this topic in the list of the self-learning ones. This way, your students will get a better vision of the security issues and will be able to pay more attention to your discipline.

Pay Attention To Ultimate Users

Most IT professionals will not open a suspicious email in their box. However, this rule is not working for experts in other areas. That is why it is necessary to show off your learners that the user is the weakest point of the security of any platform. For example, the device can be protected by tons of security software. However, the end-users might easily switch the entire security system of their device. This way, it becomes vulnerable. It is necessary to create any software or set up a network keeping in mind the possible skills of non-professional users.

Find A Balance Between Automation and Manual Testing

Many IT students become project managers, product owners, QA engineers, and might even launch their own businesses. Anyway, most of them will interact with the process of software development and testing.

Taking care of the quality assurance process is one of the most important things for the overall success of the final product or service. Lead QA engineers are responsible for managing the entire testing process. A skilled manager should take care of the healthy balance between manual and automated testing. The fact is that automation makes the QA process much faster. However, lots of weak points might be missed when using only this method of testing. Performing manual tests by several QA engineers increases the chances of detecting a bug or error in the software. This way, hackers will have little to no chance to damage the software or steal important data.

Avoid Being a Perfectionist

It is impossible to create software with no vulnerabilities. This is the main rule any student who is learning cybersecurity should know. Building a Fort Knox app or service requires plenty of time, effort, and money. However, the budgets of the software developing companies are limited. Therefore, the team needs to make a safe, useful, and customer-friendly app. The truth is that in case you focus on security, the software might fail to get the necessary features and lose its competitiveness on the market. However, taking care of user interface and extra options only might make the app an easy hacker target. Therefore, security is not the area for exceptional perfectionism.

However, there are still exceptions to this rule. In case you are building banking, financial, cryptocurrency, or other solutions that deal with money transfer, security should become your top priority. These solutions are widely attacked by hackers and malware. Therefore, they should be 100% safe for users. Losing money is the worst thing that can happen to the user.

Try To Become An Ethical Hacker

Being an ethical hacker is a job for developers, IT experts, and other industry professionals with exceptional skills. An ethical hacker is a person who receives money for finding vulnerabilities in certain software. And yes, these are completely legal experts who successfully passed certification 312-50. Moreover, there are plenty of companies who are ready to pay a good deal of money for this service.

Learning to think like a hacker is surely difficult. However, it is still possible. The students will need to become professionals in cybersecurity and have advanced knowledge of various IT systems.