13岁北京初中生成中国年龄最小的“黑客”

A 13-year-old boy earned the title of the youngest hacker in China with his conspicuous presence as a speaker at the China Internet Security Conference last week in Beijing, Chinese-language media reported.

    Wang Zhengyang, a bespectacled Junior 2 student from the High School Attached to Tsinghua University, stunned many people because of his young age among top-level professionals.

    Wang started using the Internet at age 8 when he was a second grader. He said he spent about six months playing Happy Farm, stealing virtual vegetables from other people, but he soon got bored.

    He taught himself programing and began to write programs almost on instinct.

    His father saw that his son was addicted to programing and bought him a top-notch notebook as encouragement. The new notebook became a motivation for him, and his interest grew even stronger. In five years, the notebook’s keyboard was worn out.

    He said he started to use visual basic language in programing, which meant he had to learn English. Sometimes, he had to use an interpreter to help with some of the English codes, but thanks to the experience, he said, he now has a good grasp of the language.

    At age 10, he started his own website with 400 yuan (US$ 65) he had saved from his allowance, and two years later, he created a new website with programs he developed by himself.

    In April, Wang submitted to cyber-security company 360.com a list of systematic flaws that could pose a threat to hundreds of websites that specialize in online education. An engineer at the company said that although the flaws Wang had discovered were elementary, he exhibited an amazing sense of cyber security and web technology know-how that far exceeds other people his age.

    Wang said his goal is to help websites find their loopholes and fix them, instead of finding ways to take advantage of the problems.

    He prefers to be called a “white hat,” a term used for cyber guardians who can identify a computer or Internet system’s security flaws and repair them before a vicious attack happens, rather than a “hacker.”

    “I don’t use my knowledge to do illegal things, and that makes all the difference,” he said.

    He admitted that he was sweating with nervousness when he spoke at the conference, but he never considered not giving his speech. “I want others to know that even someone my age can get involved in cyber security. I want to prove my existence to the world.”(Anna Zhao)