Maine high schoolers tackle cyber defense

Maine high school students will soon have an opportunity usually exclusive to their collegiate counterparts. This year, the University of Maine System is organizing the first Maine Cyber Defense Competition (MECDC) for high school students.

The competition, sponsored entirely by the University of Maine system, is specifically designed for tech-savvy and motivated high schoolers who wish to pit their abilities against simulated network intrusions and debilitating software issues.

Though Maine has a modest 85 high schools, George Markowsky, chair of UMaine’s Department of Computer Science and the primary promoter of the competition, is optimistic about the event and believes that “anything over 10 (schools participating) would be a success for the first year.”

Markowsky believes that creating a high-school level for the competition can be a healthy outlet for computer-savvy teens, saying, “Many students get interested really pretty early.
They grow up with computers. I think part of the interest of doing it at the high school level is maybe to channel some of their energies into a more socially positive direction.”

The MECDC is based on a post-secondary predecessor, the Northeast Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (NECCDC). The NECCDC has been running high-level cyber security events for several years at various colleges around the Northeast and will be hosted at the University of Maine in Orono this year.

Although college teams have been competing against each other in these multiple-day cyber security challenges for years, the high school equivalent was nonexistent until schools in Indiana decided to test out their own competition. Indiana’s model was successful enough to spur Raymond Albert, professor of computer science at the University of Maine at Fort Kent, to propose a Maine-based version “at the tail end of last spring”, Markowsky said.

Organizers want the competition to become an annual fixture, saying that it could bode well for the computer science departments in many Maine high schools.

The competition is a team-based, three-stage event. The teams must first put themselves through a practice round scheduled for March 3 and then compete remotely from their respective schools in the qualification round on March 9. The highest-scoring eight teams will advance to the finals round, a day-long event hosted at a central location.

Hoping that the event will be a success, Markowsky looks to further events and student participation in cyber security activities. He points out that “the math league is done at all schools, so there’s no reason that a computer science league can’t be.”

By Pat Brown, Special to Mass High Tech
http://www.masshightech.com/stories/2010/01/18/daily23-Maine-high-schoolers-tackle-cyber-defense.html