Security firm Palo Alto Networks has teamed up with the Girl Scouts of the USA to train the young cookie peddlers to be white hat hackers.
The collaboration will ultimately result in a series of cybersecurity badges that will be available starting in 2018, according to a recent release by Palo Alto Networks.
Available to girls in grades K-12, the badges came from the young girls themselves who expressed an interested in wanting “to know how to make sure they don’t get bullied online…older girls want to know how can you prevent cyber attacks,” said Girl Scouts CEO, Sylvia Acevedo, according to Fortune. Acevedo said that the older girls are also really interested in being a part of hackathons.
The new initiative would aid in helping lower the deficit of qualified cybersecurity professionals, in addition to helping more women join the cybersecurity industry, who currently only hold 11 percent of cybersecurity jobs globally, according to an (ISC)² study.
