Calling All Southern California Junior & Senior High School Students: Accept the Mayor’s Challenge to Become a Cyber Warrior
San Diego - The San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders’ Office has again partnered with Securing Our eCity, the ESET Foundation, SAIC, NDIA and UCSD to host the San Diego Mayor’s Cyber Cup Challenge, to take place at UCSD in late March 2012. This event is a part of their STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics) outreach programs, and seeks to encourage junior and senior high school students to consider majors and careers in STEM disciplines.
The San Diego Mayor’s Cyber Cup invites all San Diego high schools to participate in a three-phase cyber defense competition. The first two rounds (qualification and preliminary) will use the distributed game mode, where they can train and then compete simultaneously via the Internet. The eight winners of the qualification round will then participate in a head-to-head comprehensive final round, where each team will have its own CyberNEXS environment. (CyberNEXS provides a live exercise environment consisting of Windows and UNIX operating systems, network and security devices, as well as other information resources.)
During the final competition, teams will be scored on their ability to administer the following four essential skills:
- maintenance of critical services;
- removing vulnerabilities and hardening systems;
- communicating status and resource requirements; and
- thwarting and removing hacker activities.
Following the final round, the participating teams will be hosted to an awards banquet at UCSD.
When: Kick-off on Jan. 30, 2012. Practice rounds to be conducted during a 48-hour window in Mid-February. [The purpose of the practice round is to familiarize students with the competition environment and verify that their computer(s) are able to access the competition software and images.] Qualification round will be held in early March. [The purpose of the qualification round is to select the top 8 teams to compete in the final round.] Final round will be held on March 10, 2012.
Where: The practice and qualification rounds will be conducted at the participating teachers’ school sites. The final round will be held at UCSD’s world-renowned Supercomputer Center.
Contact: Interested teachers should contact Liz Fraumann at Securing Our eCity. Teams should consist of 6-8 interested high school students and their coach. Students should be enrolled in or have already taken AP Computer Science or Computer Science courses, though this is not a requirement.
Cost to Participate: Nothing
For further details, download the flyer (PDF) here.
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