Facebook's plan to train a new generation of cybersecurity pros

Facebook likes hackers. Not the kind that break into its accounts, but the ethical kind that can find and fix software vulnerabilities that plague massive tech companies.
In fact, it is so committed to educating and encouraging this kind of bug hunting that it’s sharing its internal Capture the Flag (CTF) security training platform with high schoolers, college students, and anyone who wants to learn how to think more like a hacker.

In making the program available on GitHub, an online repository of open source code, Facebook is giving students and budding software tinkerers a legal way to hone their research skills, but also tapping into a growing trend of using games to draw young people into technical topics such as security research. During CTF competitions, teams practice engineering and defending against cyberattacks on fake websites.
"We hope to see more people gamifying security education, both in schools and the enterprise,” said Javier Marcos, a security engineer at Facebook and the lead engineer on the CTF project. “We know playing games makes it easier to learn hard topics."