Four Poolesville High School students are on top of the world of cyber security — not hacking and stealing, but legitimately finding solutions to national security issues.
The four, calling themselves Team Alpha PHS, won the high school division of the 2011 Department of Defense Cyber Forensics competition, officially, the DC3 Digital Forensics Challenge 2011, competing against students from all over the world.
“The competition is set up and they have a whole bunch of different challenges,” said team member Kevin Harrison, 18, of Germantown.
“All [the challenges] are released at the beginning of the year and you do them at your own pace,” his twin brother Eric explained.
The challenges range in difficulty with point values of between 100 and 500, which are tied to the intricacy, according to team members. The winner is the team with the most points at the end of the 11-month competition.
With 854 points, the Poolesville team, made up of Kevin, Eric, Brendan Rowan,17, and Jack Zhu, 17, all seniors, triumphed over the 26 other high school teams from around the world that participated.
“They were terrific. This is a global contest and its not restricted to high-schoolers. In the world, in all the different categories, they came in 36th. If we put them with collegiate undergrads, they would be sixth,” said James Christy, director of the federal Defense Cyber Crime Institute.
Christy said the challenge was designed to get people excited about the field of digital science.
“There is a tremendous need for this, not only for law enforcement, but for national security,” he said. “There is not much crime out there that does not have a digital nexus; we are trying to increase the workforce.”
According to some estimates, roughly 90,000 people at the Department of Defense work in some way with cyber security.
Alpha PHS members said they started with a 100-point challenge where they were given several [computer] files and they had to match them to their hashes — a unique number assigned to each computer file.
“They didn’t tell you which file was which,” Kevin Harrison said.
Zhu said the task only took a couple of seconds, but it took about five minutes to explain the methodology, a requirement for submitting a solution.
Poolesville High School does not have a cyber security class, computer teacher Jack Stansbury said. The students did the work on their own.
“We met over the Internet sometimes and sometimes we got together,” Zhu said.
He also said they took the summer off from working on the challenges and started again in the fall when they realized they had a chance to win the high school category.
“The website shows the scoreboard. When there was one month to go, we figured we had a good chance to win [because] we didn’t have [all our work] in,” Zhu said. “Our closest competitor was a team in the United Kingdom.”
Christy and special agent Brian Andrzewski presented the team an award at Poolesville High School on Dec. 9.
The students each won a $250 gift card from Best Buy and the team, plus computer teachers Stansbury and Mark Estep, earned a trip to the 2012 Department of Defense Cyber Crime Conference in Atlanta.
pmcewan@gazette.net
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