Cyber skills are proving to be a competitive draw for local students, as schools nurture teams of curious young coders, programmers and techies to compete on a national level.
The annual AFCEA TechNet Augusta Conference came to the downtown Marriott Convention Center, last week. Military and industry officials convened to network, discuss and market new tech.
Parsons Augusta, one of the participating companies, hosts the yearly AFCEA TechNet Augusta International Military and Collegiate Capture the Flag Event at the Georgia Cyber Innovation and Training Center. Some 30 teams of college students and military service members from eight countries competed in a Jeopardy-style problem-solving game.
On Wednesday, Aug. 16, Parsons hosted its version of the capture the flag competition created for CSRA middle and high school students.
Roughly 120 students, divided into more than 20 teams, gathered at the Georgia Cyber Center (or participated virtually), to match their burgeoning cyber expertise.
“The capture the flag event is very much a knowledge skills test,” explained Tom Barnes, vice president of capture development at Parsons. “We give them 10 different categories across the cybersecurity spectrum… and each one of those categories go from easy to hard.”
The “easy” problems earn fewer points, and the “hard” problems earn more. Categories include Windows security, cryptography, Linux, forensics, web exploitation and several others.
Parsons began hosting the High School and Middle School Capture the Flag events in 2018. After that the Cyber Center approached Parsons about coordinating an international capture the flag competition.
The company reaches out to the schools about the event, and maintains relationships with their computer science departments. One focus of the event is to encourage students to work together to apply the skills they’ve learned in school, says Barnes.
“We’ve taught the students this, how to approach it and how we’ve seen other successful teams approach it: if you have somebody who is very skilled at Windows let that person go do some of the Windows problems, while you’re working on this,” Barnes said. “And then once you guys get to the harder problems you come together collectively to try to solve it. So a lot of it is teamwork.”
Greenbrier High School won first place in the Capture the Flag high school event, as it did last year. Its team participates in several contests, like Parsons’ event, to prepare for the international CyberStart America cybersecurity competition.
Many students, driven to win, will immerse themselves in the challenge, said Ty Abero, cyber coach at Greenbrier High School.
“They’re going to naturally gravitate to the toughest ones because they want to get the points,” he said.
Abero notes that the cyber courses — which require students to participate in the competitions — attract a wide range of kids, from typical tech-savvy “nerdy” types who are likely already interested in the material, to football players, wrestlers and members of the fishing team who “catch the bug.”
Common qualities among the students, however, seem to be competitiveness — “They want to win, right?” — and the unique social interaction. “We have quite a few introverts, actually,” said Abero. “This is their social club.”
Skyler Q. Andrews is a staff reporter for The Augusta Press. Reach him at skyler@theaugustapress.com.
