In the early 2000s, growing up in a third-world country with limited resources meant computers and operating systems were constantly breaking. That scarcity pushed me to tinker and experiment, I learned to troubleshoot hardware, reinstall OSes, and reverse-engineer odd behaviors. I even experimented with keyloggers out of curiosity. That practical, trial-and-error schooling is where a lot of the so called “common sense” about security comes from. It is less theory, more failing, fixing, and learning what actually keeps one safe online.
I think it all stemmed from curiosity to learn and tinker. I wonder if gamifying it is enough but it’s a step.
I don't think you can recreate this in any top-down manner no matter how well-intentioned.
It has to matter to them, and what's more, it gives you extra boost if you aren't supposed to do it and no parent or teacher pats you on the shoulder, but rather your friends or people in online forums like it, or simply you like it for yourself, seeing that the computer does what you want.
I learned computers by making a website for my school class, where we would put pictures from events and excursions, hosted a chat and a phpbb, designed the graphical elements in cracked warez Photoshop etc. This forced me to naturally pick up the skills. HTML, JS, burning ISO to CD, downloading things etc. Also warez games, learning about the Program Files difectory at like age 8 and how to copy the cracked exe there. Or setting up port forwarding for multi-player gaming.
Or when I modded GTA (3/VC/SA) with new car models that I built in 3D modeling software based on hunting down the orthographic projection blueprints of our family car, or adding the police vehicles from my country in GTA, messing with textures etc.
Or translating games from English, reverse engineering the binary file that contained the strings, I figures out that the length of each string was also there and I had to modify that too, learn about big endian and little endian, learn to work with a hex editor, understand what hex is. It was super exciting. If I had a lecture from some teacher about hex representation with some exercises at the end of the chapter for homework, I likely would have found it boring. But here I had context, I had a goal, and I had no idea what I was looking at when I opened the hex editor, I just saw that people used similar tools for translating other games and so I tried on less popular games where nobody had a specialized tool yet, it felt like making discoveries, going deep into the jungle and prevailing.
Now to contradict myself, I did have a lot of fun also while solving PythonChallenge.com, even though it's artificial tasks. But at least I found it myself online and wasn't handed to me and nobody knew or cared that I was working on it.
So I think this is just really hard to externally motivate if the kids don't have any desires or drive to see some effect caused by them. And maybe even I wouldn't do it in the current software and phone environment.
But we also have to remember that a generation ago it was also not many people who were really into computers.
The supposed target of this game do not at all match who can actually play it. Kids don't have Macs. Those who want to hack don't have iPhones. I would even say that a kid with an iPhone will never get the necessary curiosity about computers to want to hack anything.
I have not used the app but the developer Paul Hudson was the guy who taught me Swift and UIKit when I was in college and wanted to dig into iOS development for fun. He’s truly gifted when it comes to teaching.
Cool idea I was going to check it out but I don’t want to update my iPad to the latest OS for jailbreaky reasons. Any chance you could release support for something slightly before 18.5?
This is why I like the Try Hack Me platform so much. You have a lot of walkthroughs and guided challenges to get started and learn the basics; challenges get harder and harder with less and less help. You also have access to challenge write-ups even if you did not complete them, meaning that if you're stuck, instead of losing motivation, you can make progress.
They embrace learning for all levels and helped me so much getting into infosec professionally.
Do you also teach kids about jail time and/or being blackballed by the industry? Because no matter how well-intentioned you are I can see a 13 year old me doing the naughty thing.
Nice, I am a fan of this idea and have been trying to figure out the right way to engage my niece in computers in a real way. One of my biggest concerns from seeing how it impacted my stepdaughter (now in college) is how kids are not learning how general purpose computers work and are becoming too comfortable existing entirely in restricted environments like iPads and Chromebooks. With my niece, I'm taking more active measures to ensure she learns how things actually work.
I bought the full version because I'm not a fan of in-app purchases in things marketed at children, and I'll give it a playthrough myself first to make sure it fits the bill. One of the upcoming projects we're going to do together is to build a mechanical keyboard. I'm also going to build a PC with her and try to teach her the basics so she can explore mostly uninhibited on Linux.
>how to do SQL injection, how to use rainbow tables to figure out hashes, how to use steganography to hide data in images, and more.
I feel like there are more practical and timeless topics that will still be relevant in 2040. Frameworks (abstraction) have largely solved SQL injection and bad cryptography.
Personally I would avoid a cybersecurity focused corriculum and just focus on regular software engineering. Being able to think like who you are attacking and knowing the common pitfalls is most of the battle.
Why I'm teaching kids to hack computers
(hacktivate.app)266 points by twostraws 22 October 2025 | 109 comments
Comments
I get the market forces and such but I don't want to have an app subtly teach my non-existent kids to reach out to in-app purchases like that.
I think it all stemmed from curiosity to learn and tinker. I wonder if gamifying it is enough but it’s a step.
It has to matter to them, and what's more, it gives you extra boost if you aren't supposed to do it and no parent or teacher pats you on the shoulder, but rather your friends or people in online forums like it, or simply you like it for yourself, seeing that the computer does what you want.
I learned computers by making a website for my school class, where we would put pictures from events and excursions, hosted a chat and a phpbb, designed the graphical elements in cracked warez Photoshop etc. This forced me to naturally pick up the skills. HTML, JS, burning ISO to CD, downloading things etc. Also warez games, learning about the Program Files difectory at like age 8 and how to copy the cracked exe there. Or setting up port forwarding for multi-player gaming.
Or when I modded GTA (3/VC/SA) with new car models that I built in 3D modeling software based on hunting down the orthographic projection blueprints of our family car, or adding the police vehicles from my country in GTA, messing with textures etc.
Or translating games from English, reverse engineering the binary file that contained the strings, I figures out that the length of each string was also there and I had to modify that too, learn about big endian and little endian, learn to work with a hex editor, understand what hex is. It was super exciting. If I had a lecture from some teacher about hex representation with some exercises at the end of the chapter for homework, I likely would have found it boring. But here I had context, I had a goal, and I had no idea what I was looking at when I opened the hex editor, I just saw that people used similar tools for translating other games and so I tried on less popular games where nobody had a specialized tool yet, it felt like making discoveries, going deep into the jungle and prevailing.
Now to contradict myself, I did have a lot of fun also while solving PythonChallenge.com, even though it's artificial tasks. But at least I found it myself online and wasn't handed to me and nobody knew or cared that I was working on it.
So I think this is just really hard to externally motivate if the kids don't have any desires or drive to see some effect caused by them. And maybe even I wouldn't do it in the current software and phone environment.
But we also have to remember that a generation ago it was also not many people who were really into computers.
[0] https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/
[1] https://hacknet-os.com/
Thanks for all the hard work.
However, please get rid of micro-transactions...
I'm fine paying full price of the product for my kid, but not micro-transactions.
They embrace learning for all levels and helped me so much getting into infosec professionally.
https://www.hacktivate.app/img/framed-ipad-3.png
The game industry needs to move away from milking vulnerable people with pay-to-win schemes.
You need to understand your market better!
I never figured out how to do that "cat flag" terminal privilege escalation.
I bought the full version because I'm not a fan of in-app purchases in things marketed at children, and I'll give it a playthrough myself first to make sure it fits the bill. One of the upcoming projects we're going to do together is to build a mechanical keyboard. I'm also going to build a PC with her and try to teach her the basics so she can explore mostly uninhibited on Linux.
I feel like there are more practical and timeless topics that will still be relevant in 2040. Frameworks (abstraction) have largely solved SQL injection and bad cryptography.
Personally I would avoid a cybersecurity focused corriculum and just focus on regular software engineering. Being able to think like who you are attacking and knowing the common pitfalls is most of the battle.