A school set by Anonymous hackers has been running for about two months now. The school offers to teach anyone how to be a computer hacker for 35USD. You can find their website here: http://www.canthack.us/

Classes are run by any one of 5 instructors 3 times a week in their chatroom. The lessons cover areas like how to remain anonymous and how to take advantage of badly designed computer systems.

The school itself seems to have no official agenda other than to produce as many competent hackers as possible but most of the teachers seem to have various flavours of the antisec philosophy toward hacking.

The problems with teaching these sorts of skills are as obvious as for a teacher of Karate and it will largely depend on the character of the student what kind of hacker they will turn out to be.

With their new skills a hacker might fight against corrupt dictatorships by damaging internet filtering software or taking down websites, then again they might steal a massive amount of personal data such as credit card numbers and sell them to the highest bidder, the teachers at canthack.us or the “blackhat academy” seem equally happy to teach you to do either. No matter what you plan to do the skills you use will be largely the same.

If you are a law enforcement agency your first reaction might be to nip it in the bud, however even if you could successfully take down this site, this is not an isolated case, this is a response to a growing need for newly Anonymous members to get training. While there may be several thousand Anonymous, very few of those have any significant part in the operations that make headlines. For every “elite hacker” there are at least a hundred lay Anonymous.

Which is a problem for them because currently hacking seems to be their only means of protest since chanology started to slow down. For a long time Distributed Denial of Service has been at the heart of almost every operation, however the effect is minimal compared to the hbgary or the lulzsec leaks. A few attempts to rectify this have emerged including a few channels in Anonops inspired by AntiSec, none of them have been anywhere near as successful as the academy.

Those of you who are worried about some sort of hacker Armageddon can relax though, even if this school does manage to produce a large number of hackers these things tend to balance themselves out, remember hackers can earn a large amount of money protecting system as well as attacking them.

Translated by: http://www.pajareo.com/14726-blackhat-academy-la-escuela-de-hackers-de-anonymous/

Update 1: Thanks to elitenoob for spelling and grammar edits