HackerTeen

HackerTeen teaches adolescents, from 14 to 19 years of age, about computer security networks, entrepreneurship on the internet and hacker ethics. The aim of the project is to reach out to young people all across the world. Currently, the project is available only in Portuguese in Brazil, though English and Spanish language versions are being developed. We have published one of our stories in english.

The project was called “unique” by the Harvard Business School because of its innovative methods that involve challenges, games, RPG, Linux and comics.

Objectives

The objective of the project is to teach technology in an innovative and enjoyable way, training young people to work with computer security and preparing them to protect companies-instead of invading them! Also, to reduce the time and energy they spend on computer games, MSN and MySpace Orkut.

In order to achieve this goal, HackerTeen:

• Promotes a sense of hacker ethics and culture in the adolescent, demystifying the term which has erroneously been confused with cracker-a true criminal who invades computers and steals passwords
• Keeps young people from becoming crackers and thus reducing digital crime by young people, alerting them to the consequences of inappropriate attitudes
• Awakes in young people the entrepreneurial attitudes that people such as Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds, Michael Dell; the creators of Google, Amazon, HP and others had
• Prepares them to work with computer networks and computer security. To achieve this goal, the entire computer content of HackerTeen is focused on servers and not desktops (end users). Company data on the servers needs to be protected and this is where the best salaries are

Important Note: HackerTeen has no intent of creating hackers, much less crackers, though we do show young people the road to take in order to become an ethical hacker by providing them with the necessary skills to do so.