Don鈥檛 call students hackers, says director of hackbase.com

Call them computer nerds, skilled online technicians or tech-savvy professionals. But don't call them hackers.

There is no secret about the type of training and skills students learn from the online courses offered by Hackbase. com but there's no secret agenda, the school's director told the Global Times.

Most students never need to visit the website's sunless office building located quite a distance from downtown Beijing.

Despite its suspicious name, hackbase.com's operators want to let people know it is a legitimate computer school for defensive purposes and not an illegal hacking school.

"We don't train hackers, instead we provide professional training for Internet security. It's up to the trainees whether they want to be a hacker or network administrator," said Chen Qian, director of the training department.

The online classes are given in the evening and cover topics such as computer maintenance, anti-virus, data recovery, code protection and network attack and defense.

The courses, which cost between 398 to 1,998 yuan ($58- 292), are "easy" and aimed at everyone, even those without a college background or without English language skills, Chen said.

"It's very important to popularize knowledge of Internet security because the majority of our Internet users are using the same system, any serious system failure may leave our country paralyzed," Chen said.

People may perk up their ears after they hear that the founder of the site is Wang Xianbing.

Wang is a well-known hacker who once hacked into some Japanese websites after a Japanese political group claimed in 2000 that the "Nanking Massacre is the biggest lie in the 20th century," said Vistastory, an online magazine.

The hacking left many Japanese sites paralyzed for a while.

Hackbase.com, which is founded in 2003, was originally a forum for technology communication.

It is presently one of the top three schools of its kind in China with more than 1 million registered members. In July, it got 10 million yuan ($1.5 million) in funding from an undisclosed individual.

Wang's actions against the Japanese websites were patriotic in some ways.

When people logged into those Japanese sites, they saw the Chinese flag going up and they heard the Chinese national anthem, the report said.

Despite Wang's hacker background and lots of messages on the site showing great interest in hacking, Chen said the courses teach people defense rather than attack skills and members are not encouraged to hack websites.

Chen said more than 80 percent of site members are technology lovers between 20 to 30 years old and the courses offer a chance to get better jobs.

Critics said Hackbase doesn't represent a new generation of hackers, but it attracts hacker enthusiasts.

Wang Sixin, a professor of communication at the Communication University of China, said it is up to people how they use the skills.

"It doesn't matter what the hacker school teaches, it matters how they use the technology," Wang said.

"Actually, the Internet police are learning the same technology, that's to say, we could turn hackers into Internet police with the proper guidance."

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