Navy offers NROTC scholarships to cyberhackers - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

Navy offers NROTC scholarships to cyberhackers

Patrick Wells hacked his first computer when he was 11 years old.

Today, the 18-year-old lives in a room jam-packed with five computers, four servers, several routers and other electronic equipment that he constructs, deconstructs and analyzes daily.

“I like the challenge and I like to figure out how it works,” said Wells, a student at Mercer County Community College in West Windsor, N.J.

When he heard about a competition that would let him test his hacking skills in a virtual cyber war, Wells couldn’t pass it up.

So he enrolled in the U.S. Cyber Challenge, a series of cyberhacking competitions that starts later this month. Sponsors SANS Institute and the Center for Strategic and International Studies identify participants who perform well and connect them with further training and cybersecurity jobs — many in the government or military.

But this year, the Navy wants to get in game early by going after the top 20 percent of the contestants right away.

The Navy will grant five four-year college scholarships to top Cyber Challenge performers who are eligible for the Naval ROTC program. Recipients can apply their scholarships to a number of universities with cyberstudies and NROTC programs. The students will be trained to become naval cyber warfare engineers or information warfare officers after graduation.

“We recognized early on that there’s a need in the evolving and changing nature of warfare,” said Chief of Naval Personnel Vice Adm. Mark Ferguson, who oversees the scholarships. “Many of us at our age are digital immigrants, and we need digital natives.”

Currently, there are 44,000 active and reserve positions connected to cybersecurity in the Navy, which conducted a grand overhaul of its information security program recently as part of a four-step plan to achieve a “proactive” state of cybersecurity by 2013.

Experts estimate only 1,000 people in the United States are qualified to perform at the highest levels to do the work necessary to secure the country’s electronic information.

For the U.S. to become competitive in this arena, experts estimate between 10,000 and 30,000 workers are needed in cybersecurity-related positions.

“We as a nation can’t use our superiority and weapons if we don’t control the computers because the computers fire the weapons,” said Alan Paller, director of cyber-research at SANS Institute. “Because we are more computerized than other countries, we are more vulnerable than others.”

Wells hopes to be one of the military professionals in this emerging field. He’s going after the naval cyber-option scholarship through Cyber Challenge.

“I’d like to be an officer, so I have to go to college,” Wells said.

He dreams of being a pilot in the Marine Corps but said that working in a cybersecurity position would be “adrenaline-pumping.”

Wells said hackers can be misunderstood as troublemakers — but they’re needed to help identify weaknesses in systems and programs.

“You need a good programmer but you also need a good hacker, a good tester,” he said.