Dive Brief:
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Facebook announced it made its hacking game open source to allow more people, including students, to access and play it.
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Set up as a competition, Facebook Capture the Flag involves answering questions related to information security and occasionally "hacking" a website or service, though Facebook stresses that it does not condone any illegal activity.
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Making the game open source allows anyone to add to the code and set up their own sessions, outside of Facebook-arranged competitions.
Dive Insight:
Facebook has been using the game to set up competitions for several years, but it just made it open source on Wednesday in hopes of expanding interest and access to it.
The game may also have the added benefit of boosting kids' interest in cybersecurity.
"A software engineer job gets filled in a month," said Javier Marcos, a security engineer at Facebook. "But a security engineer job gets filled in six, seven months."
Marcos said one of the engineers who built the latest version of the game joined Facebook after he got interested in security issues while playing Facebook Capture the Flag in college.
Cybersecurity experts are in short supply in both the public and the private sector. According to Bob Melk, president of Dice, "It’s more and more difficult for CIOs to find talent with skills in key areas such as cloud development, data science (and) security."
