Best 300 U.S. student hackers compete for cybersecurity scholarships, prizes
in the high school computer forensics challenge.
To quality for the event, the three-member team from IMSA was provided with two “virtual machines” on their own personal computers. The virtual machines had been broken into by a cyber intruder and the students had to search system log files, scour the Internet for evidence, find and repair corrupted data, track what the intruder had done and draw conclusions.
The preliminary qualifying project lasted three weeks, and the students worked entirely on their own from their dorm room computers and even from home on the weekends, said faculty sponsor Pandya.
“Basically, we were a forensics team solving a mystery like a private detective but through cyber data rather than physical data,” Goins said.
During the two-day competition in New York, the team was allowed three hours to conduct additional forensics work on the same preliminary problems, draw conclusions and write a summary paper.
“We had to take three weeks of work and condense it down into three hours of work and write a paper saying, ‘Here’s our conclusions and here’s what we found to back it up. … This is why we think this person is guilty of the crime,’” McInerney said.
Goins said he always viewed his own hacking and cyber-sleuthing as a personal hobby and hadn’t considered computer forensics as a potential career path.
The competition “opened my eyes that there are other high schoolers doing this,” he said. “I had never seen so many competent people in one room.”
McInerney was similarly awestruck at the level of competition among the hundreds of high school students participating in the two-day event. “I hang out with the IT people on campus (at IMSA),” he said. “The skill level people have developed from all over the U.S. was pretty advanced for just high school students.”
Pandya found the experience to be invaluable for her students, and she hopes to send more teams to the competition next year. “It was just amazing for our kids to see Homeland Security is recruiting kids like them to fight cyber crime,” she said.
Some of the federal security agencies offered competitive scholarships to high school students that included fully paid undergraduate tuition, a salary while in school and a guaranteed job after graduation.
Pandya noted that recent job statistics reflect a current shortage of software engineers. “It’s good for our kids to see there are so many jobs out there for computer science students,” she said.
