U.S. and UK universities: welcome to cybersecurity 401.

• Position: CYBERSECURITY

The best way to beat a hacker is to be a hacker. Seniors at the Polytechnic Institute of New York (UNY-Poly) are learning how to be "white-hat" hackers, experts with hands-on experience to help businesses and government agencies protect their data from cyber attacks.

"It's the new espionage," Evan Jensen, a senior at UNY-Poly, told Associated Press's Jake Pearson. "Spies operate from behind keyboards now." Jensen is one of the leaders of the university's "Hack Night" events where a group of students meet weekly to hone their hacking skills.

Of course they aren't really hacking; that would be illegal. But professors and industry experts collaborate to create exercises that emulate real-world hacking scenarios. Dan Guido, a cybersecurity expert and UNY-Poly's very own "hacker in residence," uses China's 2011 attack on Google e-mail accounts-many of the details of which have been made public--as a case study. The students have to map out, step by step, how the hackers accessed a desktop computer and broke into the company's network.

While Georgia Tech, Purdue, and Carnegie Mellon are well known for their cybersecurity programs, some experts consider UNYPoly to be among the best programs because of the hands-on, mission-critical, cybersecurity skills the students are gaining, writes Pearson. Not surprisingly, these students' job prospects are extremely good. A 2012 report conducted by the SANS Institute, a cybersecurity training organization, stated that the Department of...