Gabi Dreo, a professor of IT security and the executive director of Germany’s Code research institute, has announced the start of training talented cyber security experts who will be able to deter hackers from breaking into systems. The professor has emphasized that they are seeking to get some 120 students in the course, and they will be able to live in accommodations being built on the campus. While noting that they need a “nerdy type,” Dreo stressed that the soldiers also have to be fit for real-life combat.
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It’s been a year since everything related to IT in the Bundeswehr has been concentrated in the KdoCIR, or cyber- and information space headquarters, which envisages hiring 13,500 soldiers and 1,500 civilians within few years. Cyberspace is being viewed as a division of the armed forces on par with the army, the navy and the air force.
"We're having construction work done here together with ZITiS, the Central Office for Information Technology in the Security Sphere, and we'll be sitting in the same building [in Munich]," Deutsche Welle (DW) cited Dreo as saying, who also added that it would be a “very productive space for cyber defense.”
"That's not our subject, but of course we have to know how an attacker thinks if we want to defend ourselves effectively," Dreo replied to DW’s question on developing attack tools.
In the meantime, it is still unknown what the armed forces’ cyber capabilities are, albeit some reports suggest that very talented hackers have managed to hack into a telephone company in Afghanistan with an eye to spying on the Taliban.