Pierluigi Paganini
March 21, 2016
Denmark’s FE (Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste), the country’s intelligence agency, announced last week plans to create a government ‘hacker academy’ in response to the need to improve country cyber security.
The Danish hacker academy is a hacking school that will train black hat hackers for offensive and defensive purposes starting from August 1, 2016.
The Danish security and intelligence service FE will recruit talented IT nerds interested in supporting the activities of the Danish Government in the cyber space. The FE is worried by the militarization of the cyberspace state, foreign governments could use cyber tools for offensive purpose aimed to cyber espionage and sabotage.
The Danish intelligence also plans to train its cyber army against terrorist organisations online.
The Danish Government has launched a media campaign using the following the slogan:
“Have you got what it takes to become a member of a secret elite unit?”
Lars Findsen, the head of FE, is confident that Government experts could support the growth of talented nerds.
“This is not about fully-capable hackers – hopefully, there are not many of those out there, anyways – but about people who have the basic skills we can build on,” Findsen told Politiken.
The Danish hacker academy provides a training program includes three modules spread across four and a half months.
The first one is a basic module on the network and computer security, the second one is a module on defensive hacking, and the training closes teaching offensive hacking techniques to the participants.
The Danish hacker academy will be located in Copenhagen, but its location is still a mystery, all the participants that will successfully complete the training will be enrolled in PET’s Computer Network Exploitation team. But beware, only a privileged few will be selected annually.
“The selection process will be supervised by psychologists and PET’s own IT specialists and is based on the same recruitment process used for the elite commando frogman corps of the Royal Danish Navy.” states a post published by the FE online.
“Officially termed ‘network retrieval‘, in reality the recruits would be helping FE with cyber espionage against foreign powers, writes Politiken – a type of activity that would normally get you sent to prison.“
The experts at FE have no doubt, the Danish hacker academy will provide hacking excellences, high-skilled hackers that will form a new cyber army operating abroad and inside the country.
(Security Affairs – Danish hacker academy, Information Warfare)
