Have you heard of ethical hacking? Read how one of Fyling Hall’s well intentioned students used his desire to keep busy during Lockdown to learn more about an ever-growing sector of computer science.

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During the holidays one of our Y10 international students, who has only been with us for less than 18 months, contacted me via our remote learning platform, Teams. He asked if I could suggest a free course for him to learn how to program in Python. He wanted to keep himself busy during these strange times of isolation and social distancing from Coronavirus. I pointed him in the direction of a few websites that could help. Shortly afterwards I received these images and text.

I started to learn programming about 2weeks ago. I started it because I wanted to make my own programming, but the main reason was that I wanted to know how to hack a computer or a network. I know that it takes long time to get there but I hope that I will someday. I haven’t got many things to do because of the virus so opportunely, I can work on it for more time and I am doing that. I think it is good fun and I am sure it will be useful in my future.

What he has managed to create, is a way of finding the coordinates for the turning point of a quadratic graph – the first diagram shows the code he has written; the second shows you what happens when you run the program and put some numbers into it.

And, in case you were wondering, he doesn’t mean hack into computer systems in a bad way, but in way that can help businesses protect themselves from malicious hackers. It is called “ethical hacking” and this is an ever-growing sector of computer science that can be studied at university. I am quite sure he has the determination and motivation to succeed.

Ms Wendy Banks, Head of ICT

* Student wishes to remain anonymous.