Leader: Is teaching hackers to hack a step too far?

The UK's first course in ethical hacking was announced this week and it's something which is likely to attract a lot of controversy.

After all - is it really wise to teach people such skills?

Of course the answer to that is a resounding yes. Locksmiths need to know how locks work. They need to know about the potential weaknesses and the fallibility. It's the same principle. People safeguarding anything should be aware of the ways in which it can be breached. That much is common sense.

The idea of techies putting systems and safeguards through their paces is nothing new - but the idea of an independent body doing the educating does represent a shift.

The organisers, Training Camp, claim they will carefully screen anybody taking the course but there will be many who are concerned about the rigorousness of that process. After all screening processes are invariably prone to failure and one instance of a Training Camp taught hacker involved in any kind of malicious activity will likely result in a very angry backlash about where these skills were learned.

Robert Chapman, co-founder of the Training Camp, said there has been a huge amount of interest, with about 30 queries a day about the course.

"We can take a competent network administrator and show him the type of tool that people who try to attack him use. It means they can approach their own network to find where vulnerabilities are. It is what hackers actually do that you need to know."

That's certainly the idea and it's a very sound one - but it's also easy to see how something which sounds so sensible in theory could so easily go wrong.