Microsoft Asks Colleges to Teach Hacking

Microsoft is working with a number of universities in several countries to set up courses that teach students how to write secure code, the company said Friday. The University of Leeds in England is the first to announce such a course.

As part of an 11 week module that will start in January next year, third-year undergraduates at the University of Leeds will be asked to hack into software and fix any security bugs they find, Nick Efford, senior teaching fellow at the School of Computing, University of Leeds, said.

"We are going to get our students to think about software in a different way and look at software with a different perspective. We will give them examples of software and will ask them to perform a security audit of it and identify things that are insecure and then ask them to fix the problems," Efford said.

Students will be confronted with security vulnerabilities such as buffer overruns and taught how to prevent those when writing software. That focus on security in software engineering and the hands-on experience makes the course different from most existing security classes, which typically focus on network security and cryptography, according to Efford.

Microsoft is partly funding Efford's fellowship and is helping with the curriculum's content. The Redmond, Washington, software maker is in talks with other universities on similar programs, Stuart Okin, chief security officer for Microsoft in the U.K. said.