Sporting long sideburns, a goatee and black baseball cap, US instructor Ralph Echemendia has a class of 15 buttoned-down corporate, academic and military leaders spellbound. The lesson: hacking.

The students huddled over laptops at a Los Angeles-area college have paid nearly $US4,000 ($A5,700) to attend "Hacker College", a computer boot camp designed to show how people will try to break into network systems - and how they will succeed.

"It's an amazing thing how insecure the big corporations are," said Echemendia during a break in the weeklong seminar. "It's just amazing how easy it is."

Hackers are believed to cost global businesses billions of dollars every year, and the costs to defend against them are soaring.

By Ben Berkowitz at The Age.

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