Wary city schools buck up against student 'hackers'

HYDERABAD: Wary of how technology-savvy children and young adults have become, city schools are now devising their own ways of dealing with malpractices of technology.
Several school authorities admit that students have been found tinkering with confidential information, unaware of the illegal nature of their actions. Some months ago, a 20-year-old computer science student had hacked into the database of the ICSE school exam results and boasted about his conquest on the internet, exposing how easy it is to hack into high profile 'protected' public domains.
"There have been times when students change the teacher's password on the system as a silly prank. This is a clear indication of the level of technical know-how the students possess without being formally taught hacking," said Maya Sukumaran, principal of Gitanjali School, Begumpet.
While almost every school teaches basics of programming and computer language, none of them have a module on network security or ethical hacking. "Currently, there is nothing specific on security and hacking in the syllabus, but it is important to address this side of technology as well. Considering the easy access that children have to technology, the probability of misuse is high," said Ramandeep Samra, principal of Hyderabad Public School, Ramanthapur.
Schools are therefore looking at external help from professionals to educate and warn students about technology misuse. Gitanjali School often gets criminal lawyers and computer professionals to conduct workshops for the students, while Indus International School recently conducted an interaction between employees of a leading city MNC and students, focusing on misuse of social networking sites and the internet in general.
"It is common to see children making parallel accounts on networking sites and misuse their technical skills, very often not realizing that what they do could perhaps be counted as cyber crime," said Shankar Acharya, principal of Indus International school.
Experts, meanwhile, said there is rising interest among teens in hacking and security systems. "We have had students as young as 13 attending our certified ethical hacking course,
" said Vikas Jain, security analyst at Hacker School.