Hack for prizes!!!!

CSTA ANNOUNCEMENTS LISTSERV

Carnegie Mellon University’s hacking team is designing and hosting the second annual picoCTF competition, a free online nationwide computer security event for middle and high school students. From October 27 2014 to November 7 2014, picoCTF ( http://picoctf.com ) will challenge students to learn and practice authentic hacking techniques in the context of a story-driven game created by Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center. The competition consists of a series of challenges where participants must reverse engineer, break, hack, decrypt, or do whatever it takes to solve the task. Students, with experience ranging anywhere from the somewhat computer savvy to well-versed programmers, will learn how to identify security vulnerabilities and perform real-world attacks.

By organizing a competition that presents computer science from this exciting and topical perspective, we hope to encourage students to become involved in the areas of computer science and computer security. Last year, nearly 2,000 teams of students across the country competed for $20,000 in prizes for both teams and schools. This year, we have more than $30,000 in prizes, as well as new tools designed to help teachers participate in picoCTF as a classroom activity.

For more information on the competition, as well as early registration, please visit our website at https://picoctf.com . You can also check out last year's competition at https://2013.picoctf.com .

We encourage you to contact us with any questions you may have regarding the competition at educator@picoctf.com.
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David Brumley

Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University