Contact the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and they can probably help point him to a group interested.
this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2026
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Explain Like I'm Five
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I really enjoyed google's gruyere, which is a web app built with a bunch of security vulnerabilities specifically for beginners to practice: https://google-gruyere.appspot.com/
Ok, thing of it like this. You locked yourself out of your house. You need someone to unlock your front door to access your keys on the other side. Someone with special skills could come over and pick your lock, at your request, and that's good. It's a service being provided to you. Or maybe he doesn't even charge. Maybe he just wants to do this for fun.
Then there are other lock pickers in the world. Ones who would pick the lock of an empty house to steal their stuff. That's bad. That's not the same guy who came over and helped you.
However, both are using the same skills. One for good, one for evil.
I took an "Ethical Hacking" class in college. They understood the value.
This is a great analogy.
Assuming that the patient is looking for movie style "hacking", look for a local Capture the Flag team, a lot of universities will have them.
They could start with this: https://overthewire.org/
Ok what programs and stuff does he need to start out and how to use them?
Look at the links at the bottom of this page: https://cylabacademy.org/learners.html
The Khan Academy videos look like a good place for a kid to start.
Edit: check this out, looks like it's aimed at kids: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/labs/lab/cyber/
Thanks for the links! This is really interesting, I think my son would really enjoy looking into these sources.
Your patient? Come on. We've read your other posts, what's the deal?
Go ahead and read them. Tired of getting questioned when all were for engagement and discourse. All that BS aside can you at least help out here? Or just want to give me shit?
I'm sorry you got questioned instead of being helped here.
For the record, I enjoy your thought-provoking posts. I might not agree with how some of it is phrased or whatever, but it almost always stirs conversation.
But hold up. Are you just copying and posting posts from elsewhere? I cannot believe for one minute that you are a doctor or a nurse.
I'm sure you know that I often interact with your posts, and up until this point I assumed you were a very curious, naive person, but if you're just spamming random garbage or pretending to be people you aren't, I don't think the nature of our relationship can stay the same.
There's a lot more professions than doctor or nurse where one might have a patient under their care. It's also possible that OP meant charge instead of patient depending on if English is their first language.
Plenty of doctors and nurses are naive or lacking in certain areas of "smarts".
OP has also had "I am a 40 year old traveling nurses who is a lesbian" in their profile for a while.
So your a doctor or a nurse? Go ahead....quit bating me you want me to looking through you history? See if you were ever on Reddit go through that history? Twitter facebook whatever. Your looking for a fight. I asked a question and you can't even reply to help a 10 year old. I am not going to have this debate just trying to care about someone else. Also who is this we bs. I get this crap in every single post. I posted this in 3 communities to get more attention to it. You know what insult me all you want at least other people here care.
😂 I wasn't talking about going through your post history. You're 30% of all the posts in the communities you frequent! Reading my front page every day IS your post history. And I never claimed to have patients.
Fine, maybe I'm wrong, you actually are a nurse and the only reason I was shook was because the image of you that I built in my mind was that of a 12 year old child, since all of your other posts read that way.
If so, I'm sorry I ever doubted you.
I accept your appology. Not being a dick but you are more cordial than most. Much love to you
Depending where you are in the world https://www.hackerspaces.org/ could help but be aware that "hacker" means different things to different people.
Even your local Linux user group may be able to run up a honeypot for the kid to learn how to "hack". Anything beyond that an you start getting outside the scope of white hat hacking
What you want is called white-hat (as opposed to black-hat) hacking. You could also explore ethical hacking.
Not getting on to you but how do I explain the difference's to a 10 year old and what does a white hate or black hat do? And where does one go to get a beginners book? Well I guess a website that starts from the floor to the top?? And is challenging?
A locksmith is white hat. They provide a service with the consent of the other party, and they might be compensated for it.
A burglar is black hat.
So glad I learned something today. I was beginning to think today was a waste but your comment comes along...
A white hat hacker (also called penetration testers) has permission from the target to hack them. And if they succeed in hacking them, they write a report about how they did it, this allows the target to fix the security vulnerability, and therefore avoid getting hacked in the future. The white hat hacker of course gets paid for this service. Because they have permission, this is completely legal. Some companies also offer "bug bounties", this is essentially the company offering an open invitation for anyone to hack them, as long as they promise not to break or steal anything, and to also report their findings to the company.
A black hat hacker does not have permission from the target, they break in and steal data, break things, or sometimes just gather information. They can then black mail the target, sell the data or try to monetize their services in many other ways. This is of course illegal.
Fiinally there are grey hat hackers. These people blend the above two. These are people with noble intentions, but they don't have permission from the targets, but they still report their findings anyway, or in some cases even fix the security issues themselves. This is still illegal, because they don't have permission, but in many cases the target doesn't want to press charges, because the grey hat hacker tried to help without expecting to get paid. There was a case many years ago where some regular printers has a massive security vulnerability, which allowed hackers to break into the network the printer was on, and use the printer to hack other things. And since no one ever patches their printers, they were left vulnerable. A grey hat hacker took it upon themselves to break into all the printers and force the printers to update, fixing the vulnerability. And since the people who had the printers didn't have any idea about the vulnerability or the hack, they didn't press charges... Needless to say, grey hat hacking is very dangerous, because your good intentions, and benevolent actions might still land you in jail if the company or person you are trying to help doesn't like it.
Take a look at this: https://cylabacademy.org/learners.html#learning-paths
It's built to train people in the basics of cybersecurity. They apparently have resources that are aimed at middle-schoolers and high-schoolers but I'm not very familiar with those, you'll have to dig around.
You'll see references to "CTF". That means "Capture the Flag" which is a type of hacker game/competition/exercise.