Hunched over a keyboard, eyes glazed over from lack of sleep, Tian Yihua is hacking away on his computer into the wee hours of the night. It's a typical scene for the 22-year-old, one of the students at a new Information Security Engineering School at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
Tian and his 85 classmates consider themselves the future defenders of China's information networks. To them, the battle to ensure the country's computer systems and economy aren't compromised is a fight between the good computer "hackers" and the odious computer "crackers."
"Crackers are lazy, irresponsible, and not very bright. Hackers get a basic thrill from solving problems, sharpening skills, and exercising intelligence, just like those successful athletes pushing themselves past their own physical limits. In short, hackers build things, crackers break them," said Tian.
As one of China's top schools for the slide-rule set - engineers, programmers, and scientists - Jiao Tong set up the new school in September, making it the first institute of its type in China.
The school, which is part of the East China Information Security Industrialization Base (IS Base) in the city's Zhangjiang High-Tech Park, is a segment of a 323-million-yuan (US$38.9 million) project dedicated to protecting the country from information terrorists.
"Nowadays, increasing dependence on technology could make the Internet another deadly arena for terrorists who, with hacking know-how, could easily spread chaos and destruction," the school's dean, Cheng Longgen, told Shanghai Daily.
"It's possible for a single cyber-criminal to do a staggering amount of damage far beyond what a single person could typically do in the traditional criminal world," he said.
Currently, the school only offers a master's degree program, but Cheng hopes to add a bachelor and doctorate program, and raise total enrollment to 1,000 students within three years.
Some military scholars warn that future international conflicts will be fought with both traditional weaponry and computer viruses, noted Cheng. "Governments are waking up to the dangers and taking precautionary steps."
Using America's successful Silicon Valley as a model, the school was set up in Zhangjiang where it will be close to other research institutes and high-tech companies.
"It keeps our students up to date with the demands and needs of the market, offering them a fertile bed of research and a hard-headed business sense," Cheng explained.
With the security industry growing rapidly, students like Tian shouldn't have much trouble finding work when they graduate. Some of them are expected to work for government departments, while others will go to information technology companies, said Cheng.
(eastday.com March 29, 2002)
