Cyber students can hack it

FEDERATION TAFE cyber security students recently participated in the Downunder Capture the Flag cybersecurity competition.

It is a 48-hour event where participants solve cryptography, web, open-source intelligence, reverse engineering, and exploitation problems using their hacking skills.

FedTAFE entered two teams, including an all-female group.

“It started Friday night and went until Sunday night so some of the students slept, some didn’t, but we were in the classroom the whole time,” said Dr Adam Bignold, the students’ teacher.

“There were about twelve categories of hacking like cryptography which is puzzle solving and encryption solving and reverse engineering which is about pulling apart software to find out who created it.”

From the 2100 participating teams from around the world, the all-female team took out first place in their category and the other FedTAFE team finished eighth in their category.

The competition provided an opportunity for students to practice skills they may not otherwise be able to.

“It’s a great learning opportunity because hacking is hard to learn hands-on as its illegal in many circumstances,” said Dr Bignold.

“There’s a lot of factors that hinder the teaching of cyber security in TAFE because with things like viruses, if we do it wrong, we infect the university’s network.

“These competitions allow us to practice in a safe and ethical way.”

Dr Bignold said the students had to demonstrate persistence under pressure and it was exciting to see such positive results.

“I saw incredible persistence as these challenges are not something where if you’ve learnt it before you can type in a command and solve, some problems students spent 12 hours working on.

“It was excellent to see the all-female team place first because I spent a lot of time this year doing STEM outreach, particularly for women in STEM, trying to get out numbers up.

“Only about 11 per cent of the cyber security industry is female and we’ve been trying to boost that.”