Curious Frank, a sub division run by the Scottish Business Resilience Centre (SBRC) to support business resilience through ethical hacking, has reported its highest level of enrolment since it began.

The team at Curious Frank has increased 30% since 2018, taking its total number of hackers to 23. This year has seen more female students enrolled in the course than any previous year.

Curious Frank utilises ethical hacking to identify and mitigate potential vulnerabilities, in a bid to prevent exploitation by malicious hackers. Identifying weaknesses in an organisation’s infrastructure is a major component of combating cybercrime.

SBRC, which is partnered with Curious Frank, supports students enrolled in the Ethical Hacking and Digital Forensic courses at Abertay University, training them in ethical hacking and offering them the opportunity to gain corporate experience presenting worships and events to businesses across the UK.

Abertay University was the first university in the world to offer a degree in ethical hacking. Both the university and SBRC recently announced they would be supporting a new partnership pilot project to help retrain ex-military personnel in ethical hacking and penetration skills.

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Eamonn Keane, COO for Cyber and Innovation, said: “With technology advancing and more and more criminal activities taking place online, we need a growing multiplicity of cyber-associated roles to include ethical hackers who are trained to identify and reduce the potential attack surface and reduce cybercrime.

“Identifying and mitigating weaknesses is an essential component of an overarching cybersecurity strategy and highly recommended in the ‘defence in depth’ application for Scottish businesses.

“We’re thrilled Curious Frank continues to have such huge appeal to students interested in the different ways we use tech to combat crime.

“Our amazing team of ethical hackers play a really important role in not only working with businesses to identify vulnerabilities, but also raising awareness about cybersecurity and educating organisations in how to secure sensitive data.”

Cybersecurity is one of Scotland’s fastest growing areas in the technology sector and it is estimated there are 13,000 digital tech job opportunities available every year in this field. Already a number of industries including oil and gas, finance and banking, and sports have recognised the value of ethical hackers in preventing cybercrime.

Globally, companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Uber and PayPal have also recognised the value of ethical hackers, and offer some of the most competitive bug bounty programmes in the world, with awards as high as $1.5 million for critical issues.