Ride the Lightning

Cybersecurity School to Open at Bletchley Park

December 6, 2016

For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by the work done at Bletchley Park in Britain, where the German Enigma Code was broken. So I am delighted to learn from a Naked Security post that a cybersecurity college is going to be set up at Bletchley Park to teach 16-19 year olds cybersecurity skills along with math, physics, computer science and economics.

Good news too that the college is going to be set up by a consortium of experts: BT Security, Cyber Security challenge and The National Museum of Computing are well placed in terms of computing and cybersecurity knowledge, with partner City and Guilds providing the education and qualification expertise.

The college is to be based in G Block at Bletchley Park after a £5m ($6.2 million) restoration and will house students who board.

They really took a page from history. Most of the people who worked at Bletchley Park from when it was set up in 1939 through to the finish of the codebreaking work were young people, many of them teenagers. More than half of them were women.

Some 10,000 people worked in complete secrecy at Bletchley Park during World War II. It has been said that their work shortened the war by two years, potentially saving around 22 million lives. What better place to train future cybersecurity experts than at the home of the codebreakers?

One of my favorite movies is The Imitation Game, which is a great dramatic rendition of the work done at Bletchley. It garnered eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and won for the Best Adapted Screenplay. If you haven't seen it, make this a movie night. Popcorn, anyone?

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