ARTICLE WRITTEN BY:
Romily Wells - 8B Erin Wells -8B Amber Clark -8G Mia McWalters - 8B
Last year on the 29 November 2021 we took part in a cyber security competition hosted by the NCSC (the organisation who oversee cyber security in the whole of the UK). They work with MI5 and other security forces to ensure that business, government organisations and the general public are supported with managing cyber security.
The idea of the competition was to get as many girls involved in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) as possible.
For the online qualifier we had to work in our own time at break, lunch and after school to solve as many challenges as we could in 10 days, we worked so hard and even spent time at home working on the challenges whilst on FaceTime, so we could chat about our team strategy.
As we progressed through the week the challenges increased in difficulty and required more time to figure out the solutions. Luckily, Mr Dumican had allowed us to have the day off timetable and we spent the day in IT3 with Miss Lee getting in as many points as possible, we finished with the highest points in school (with over 3,500).
There was a wide range of different challenges from morse code to coding in python. We were all very proud of ourselves, but we didn’t expect to get to the finals of the competition. Just before we were about to break up for Christmas Miss Lee arranged a meeting with us, we didn’t know what to expect, she gave us a letter and we all opened it together and it was our invite to the final. We just couldn’t believe it was true, we went from shock, to tears, to screaming down the whole IT block.
The finals had been arranged for Saturday 5 February 2022 at Media City in Salford. We all met at school then got a minibus to the venue, we got to Media City nice and early and had a Costa to get us ready for the day ahead. Once in the venue we got setup on the laptops and spied out our competition. Around 10:30am we gathered together for a meeting, where we got chance to meet the CEO of HOST and staff from GCHQ who gave us a talk on all thing's cyber security and about the various employment opportunities on offer for computing in the North West. At 11.00am game play commenced.
We were very worried to begin with as we could see the live leaderboard, our opponents had made a great start and were taking over the leaderboard. Luckily, soon after, we cracked a few expert challenges and we slowly climbed to top. For around two hours we fought it out for pole position moving between the top 5 spots. During the day we faced many different cyber security challenges, but one of our favourites was scanning credit cards to find stolen information which we then had to use to brute force attack a computer system.
The funniest challenge of all required us to put on a smart watch and get up to 250 steps, this unlocked a code which we had to enter into a computer system to retrieve the points. Every other school just stood on the spot shaking the watch, but Mia decided to do a full work out in front of every other school, we couldn’t stop laughing everyone was watching, but little did they know it was all part of the strategy; we distracted them from the challenges for a good 10 minutes whilst we were boosting our own points (and keeping fit).
Before we knew it the competition had come to an end, and we were brought back together for the final awards ceremony. First of all, we were in total shock as we found out we had got to the finals out of 7,025 girls who took part, we are so proud of our achievements and finishing fourth overall, it was great fun, and it has really inspired us to look at careers in computing and cyber security in the future.
National Cyber Security Centre - NCSC.GOV.UK
