On Thursday, a war was raging in the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Baltimore, Md.
Well, sort of.
A team of seasoned computer scientists (led by a guy with a vast experience working for “a three letter agency”) was hacking into the computers of teams made of high school students. For three and a half hours five teenagers had to cleanse and protect eight computers plagued by weak passwords, firewall with open ports and routers with default settings on.
It was all in good spirits, though.
The cyber battle was a part of the tenth annual National Youth Cyber Defense Competition, or CyberPatriot, a program created by the Air Force Association where middle school and high school students face off in cyberskills. More than as 5584 teams from around the world (1180 more than last year) squared off in three divisions: high school, middle school and U.S. Army Junior Reserve Officers (JROTC).
Jay Gehringer, 60, a computer science professor at North Hollywood High School (NHHS) in Los Angeles and the coach of the first and the second placed teams in the Open Division, said the students had to work as a team and act very quickly amid high pressure.
“Imagine if you had a house where all the doors and windows are wide open and you have to go around start locking everything and in some cases installing the locks, all while trying to kick out the burglars” he told FORBES.
“It was really stressful” attests senior Jeron Mendelsohn, 18, who was a part of the NHHS team named Togo (after the heroic 1920s Alaska sled dog) that won the Open Division competition for second year in a row. His teammate, senior Kyle Gusdorf, 18, added that throughout the year they practiced for three hours a week and that number jumped to eight hours as the date was approaching.
“The program is growing very fast, we have about 30% more teams every year” says the program director for the main sponsor of the event, Northrop Grumman’s Diane Miller. “Students are telling and bringing their friends.”
This year it included teams from countries like South Korea, UAE and Hungary. It was also the first year where an all girls team reached the finals, where 12 teams faced off in each division.
The post America’s Cyber Security Future Is In The Hands Of These High Schoolers appeared first on Statii News.
source http://news.statii.co.uk/americas-cyber-security-future-is-in-the-hands-of-these-high-schoolers/
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