Cybersecurity gurus bolster online integrity

Internet boundaries

Liu Pengju, 22, also switched his major, from information management to cybersecurity, after he had been studying at the university for a year.

However, unlike Bai, the postgraduate decided to focus on cybersecurity after watching the movie Who Am I? as a freshman. The film centered on the activities of a computer hacker group in Berlin, which was aiming for global fame.

Liu clearly remembers a scene in which the group attacked a building's network system, resulting in all the printers producing documents bearing the group's logo.

"I was shocked by the scene as I had never thought a computer program could be powerful enough to break into the infrastructure's information network. Meanwhile, I realized such computer skills couldn't be abused－that is, the internet also has boundaries－because the group was quickly exposed and hunted by cybercrime investigators after the attack," he said.

"At that time, my university offered lectures on cybersecurity, which not only demonstrated that the nation had attached greater importance to this field in recent years, but also told us that the demand for talent in the security industry had grown stronger. So, I changed my major," Liu said.

After his years of study, he has a deeper understanding of the reason the country pays such high attention to cybersecurity.

"Practical vulnerabilities are truly powerful, like those in the movie when destroying a system or even a network, but they're harder to discover and fix than I thought," he said.