Don't baby these kid hackers - CNET

In a ballroom at the Paris Resort, kids sit at tables on two sides of the room leaing to pick locks and solder circuit boards. In another coer, a hacking competition like the one Emmett described in his talk is taking place. And on the stage, speakers talk frankly about the fun -- and risks -- of hacking.

"Do you want to do more lock picking?" asks a woman leading a tired-looking kindergarten-age boy.

"No," he says vaguely and wanders off to the part of room where the soldering is happening.

Hacking for the future

For the first time this year, the conference involved presentations from kids themselves, including Emmett. His dad, Joel Brewer, got him interested in leaing how to set up a hacking competition called capture the flag using a ready-to-use platform designed by Facebook.

"It was kind of exciting, but I was a little nervous," Emmett, who is starting the fourth grade in Austin this fall, says after giving his talk. Asked if he has any favorite subjects at school other than the computer lab, he says, "Nothing besides computer lab and recess." Now, he's soldering together a circuit board that will eventually become an electronic game of Simon Says.

Facebook made its capture the flag platform open to the public this May. There was too much demand for it from schools and other child-focused organization for the company's engineers to keep up with, said Javier Marcos, who as a Facebook cybersecurity specialist helped develop the competition platform but now works at Uber.

If you're wondering why schools are teaching kids to hack and think these kids are future criminals, you've got it backward. Sure, young people do get in trouble for illegal hacking, but Facebook hopes it's helping to train the cybersecurity experts of the future.

"We started running these CTF competitions as a way to find candidates," Marcos said. Now in addition to urging universities to host the competitions, they've helped a group of high school kids from Utah and Idaho put on the r00tz Asylum capture the flag using their platform.

Passion for cybersecurity

This was a huge opportunity for Connor Jones, a 14-year-old who starts the ninth grade in Saratoga Springs, Utah, this fall. When he first talked with organizers from Facebook on the phone, he couldn't believe it.

"Facebook is on the phone, and I'm like freaking out," he says. "It was really cool."

He and the other students involved with the project worked for the first half of their summer vacation coming up with the hacking challenges that made up the game. Connor loved every second of it, waking up at 8 a.m. every day and sitting in a rocking chair in his basement working on the different parts of the competition.

He thinks he'll work in cybersecurity going forward. "I want to get out there and lea new things every day," he said.

Making a difference

After the children's speeches are over, cybersecurity expert Dan Kaminsky takes the stage. Just four days earlier, Kaminsky gave the keynote speech to a vast ballroom full of adult cybersecurity experts at the Black Hat conference, another cybersecurity event that traditionally takes place in Las Vegas just before Defcon. Now, he's facing a tough crowd of squirmy kids.