AP Tracks NYU-Poly Weekly Hackathon: Students Train for Cybersecurity Jobs
The Associated Press’s Jake Pearson sat in on NYU-Poly’s weekly Hackathon, where students are training to become “white-hat” hackers, ethical computer security experts who deploy their “hacking” skills to help them defend the information technology systems of businesses and government agencies from cyberattacks.
The weekly event gathers students interested in cybersecurity, providing an informative, legal space to hone their hacking skills. The NYU-Poly Hackathons, like other such events, involve a group of experts (or in this case, budding experts) coming together for an intensive period of collaborative work to design a solution to an identified problem.
While hacking as the term is often technically defined for legal purposes – unauthorized entrance to a computer, website, server, etc. owned by others – is against the law, students can’t operate covertly in cyberspace even for purely educational purposes. Therefore, industry experts, professors and NYU-Poly’s “Hacker In Residence,” Dan Guido, work together to design complex exercises that subject students to hacking scenarios rooted in the real world.
Julian Cohen, 22, a senior at the New York University Polytechnic Institute of New York
With careers in the technology field on the rise, especially in New York City, the popularity of – and the results produced by – the weekly Hackathons offer increasing evidence of NYU-Poly’s ever-increasing prestige in the the modern tech industry.
Per the piece, “experts say Brooklyn-based NYU-Poly is now considered among the best schools for training students with hands on, mission-critical cybersecurity skills. That’s due in part to Hack Night, an active cybersecurity club and an annual hacking competition each fall that the school bills as the largest in the country.” The article also reports that many of 270 NYU-Poly cybersecurity students have already accepted jobs paying lucrative salaries at private cybersecurity-oriented consulting firms, as well as large financial institutions, ho are frequently targets of cyberattackss