Annual Cybersecurity Games Expands Opportunities for High School Students
The
12th annual Cybersecurity
Awareness Week (CSAW) is expanding the opportunities for high
school students
to get involved with webinars in advance and self-guided online
education
modules that they can use to prepare for the High
School Forensics Challenge,
one of six contests for college and high school students to participate
in.
By
the time the event takes place November 12-14 at
the New
York University Polytechnic School of Engineering in
Brooklyn, nearly
20,000 students from around the world will have participated in
preliminary
online contests in an effort to reach the finals, which will be
attended by
hundreds of students.
In the High School Forensics Challenge,
contestants rack up points in a game show-style challenge that
culminates
in a murder mystery. Students work in teams of up to three
(plus a mentor)
to identify and analyze electronic evidence related to a crime. In the
online preliminaries, they choose from categories
including network analysis, mobile forensics, live system
forensics,
steganography and file carving, answering
questions to earn points.
The 10 teams with the most points will
receive expense-paid trips to New York to compete in the
CSAW Murder
Mystery finals. More than $450,000 in scholarships will be awarded to
high
school winners alone.
CSAW is the largest student-run cyber
security event in the nation, featuring an industry conference and career fair, in addition to the competitions.
Besides the high school contest, other
competitions include:
- The Embedded Systems Security Contest, in
which students address the real-world insecurities of digital voting as
they
research how the vote tally of an encrypted system could be corrupted;
- A Capture the Flag hacking contest where 15
undergraduate teams from the United States will participate in the final competition, a
36-hour
software hackfest;
- A competition in which graduate students whose
research has already been published will compete for the distinction of
the
Best Applied Research Paper;
- The Policy Competition, in which entrants
debate one of the most controversial issues in information security:
Should
government institute bug bounties like tech companies already employ;
- Finally, the fast-paced game show-like
Homeland Security Quiz will focus on control systems.
Featured speakers will include Brendan Hannigan,
general manager of IBM Security, and Neil Herschfield of the Industrial
Control
Systems Cyber Emergency Response.
More than 20 of the most prestigious tech
companies will be on hand to talk to finalists about internships and paid
positions at their companies.
Sponsors for the NYU CSAW who make it
possible for all the finalists to travel to the New York competition
include the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, IBM, Facebook
and
Qualcomm, among many others.
About the Author
Michael Hart is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and the former executive editor of THE Journal.