Security In The Education Process

I recently read a couple of Blog posts about Security in the education process.

Catching them early ... build security in to the psyche - Dinesh O'Bareja
Can Security be incorporated in the Computer Science & IT courses? - Dharmesh M Mehta

Both Dinesh and Dharmesh have a similar idea, i.e. integrating IT Security practices into the education process. However as much as I would like to see this happen, I think it would be an impractical idea in the current education system for India.

Most engineers and information technology professionals that are employed by the vast IT industry have a weak hold on programming languages and methodologies as they walk out of college. Most of what they know is learned on the job or in the pre-placement trainings. A lot of those brought into Systems Engineer or Developer positions are those that even lack an IT background.

Further to make this an even harder task to achieve; the syllabus is already lacking and outdated. Its hard to teach security in the education process; when we are teaching students to use Visual C++ 6.0 and Visual Basic 6.0 instead of .NET.


In my opinion, the first step to introducing Security in the education process is to educate the educators. To ensure that the teaching staff is well educated with Security Best Practices. When this happens; security practices will start trickling into their teaching methods and automatically show up in the students.

I believe that instead of teaching security practices to students, we eliminate the insecure practices being taught to them. This way when students walk out with an engineer degree, they have only been taught secure coding for the last 4 years.

At Security Brigade, we are working on many training solutions, from implementing entire Security courses to Security for the educators. We will also be holding a few ethical hacking trainings in the next few months, possibly one in Mumbai in the last week of May.