Microsoft is working with a number of universities in several countries to set up courses that teach students how to write secure code, the company said Friday. The University of Leeds in England is the first to announce such a course.

As part of an 11 week module that will start in January next year, third-year undergraduates at the University of Leeds will be asked to hack into software and fix any security bugs they find, Nick Efford, senior teaching fellow at the School of Computing, University of Leeds, said.

"We are going to get our students to think about software in a different way and look at software with a different perspective. We will give them examples of software and will ask them to perform a security audit of it and identify things that are insecure and then ask them to fix the problems," Efford said.

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