Famed U.K. codebreaking centre to be new College of Cybersecurity

Free tuition will be offered to Britain's 'most gifted 16- to 19-year-old prodigies'

By Margaret Evans, CBC News Posted: Jan 11, 2017

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Bletchley Park's G Block in Milton Keynes, England, where the National College of Cyber Security will be built. Codebreakers working in this building during the Second World War were the first to intercept messages about the Holocaust. (Pascal Leblond/CBC News)

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"The explosion of the internet means that devices that you wouldn't think of as a potential target area are really very easy to compromise," he said while touring the site of the school due for completion in 2018.

"We have to find new ways of thinking about the implications of what it is we want to do with the technology," he said.
"There are people out there, organized crime networks and nation states, who spend a great deal of money trying to figure out ways to use the stuff we buy for perfectly legitimate purposes — to subvert us, the organizations we work with and the countries we live in."

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Prodigies wanted

Tuition will be free and places will be offered to "the U.K.'s most gifted 16- to 19-year-old prodigies," according to Qufaro.
The group says Britain isn't developing enough talent quickly enough to defend against the growing threat of hacking and other forms of cybercrime, from sabotage, to industrial espionage to old-fashioned spying.

They're looking for what they call "raw talent."
"That may be advanced coding skills," says O'Connor. "It may be cryptography, it may be behaviour — you know, that they can intrinsically think like an adversary. And we need all of those skills."

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Some historians estimate that Bletchley Park's codebreaking operations shortened the Second World War in Europe by two to four years. A replica of the room-sized Colossus computer is seen in the background. (Pascal Leblond/CBC News)

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