Coding skills will be required to solve iHack

Hacking games are always good fun and can sell well too: UK student studio Introversion got its start in the business with its hack-up Uplink.

Now the similarly youthful BoomCo is hoping to do the same with its iPhone and iPod touch game iHack.

"It's a game where you hack through 10 levels," explains BoomCo's Phillip Whisenhunt.

In the first few levels you have to look through the page's 'source code' to find the answer.

Other levels have you 'hacking' into everything from the Department of Hacking to a banking login.

As you progress through the game, you unlock new features and tools that enable you to do things such as look in temporary folders for cookies and images and get access to a terminal password cracker.

"Our beta testing shows the first few levels can be completed by a non-tech savvy user, but by levels 3 and 4 they typically get stumped by binary/hex conversion," says Whisenhunt, who's studying computer science at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

In fact, in order to complete the game, you'll need knowledge ranging from SQL injections to common programming concepts such as the modulus operator.

"We provide hints for each level which should point the user in the right direction, so we hope that someone out there will be able to beat the game," he adds.