The Carnegie Mellon University’s hacking team announced it is designing and hosting picoCTF, an online nationwide high school computer security competition. From April 26th 2013 to May 6th 2013, picoCTF ( http://picoctf.com ) will invite high school students to learn and practice authentic hacking techniques in the context of a story-driven game created by Team Osiris from Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center.
The competition consists of a series of challenges where participants must reverse engineer, break, hack, decrypt, or do whatever it takes to solve the task. Students, with experience ranging anywhere from the somewhat computer savvy to well-versed programmers, will learn how to identify security vulnerabilities and perform real-world attacks. By organizing a competition that presents computer science from this exciting and topical perspective, Carnegie Mellon hopes to encourage students to become involved in the areas of computer science and computer security. For more information on the competition, a preview with sample problems, and registration please visit the picoCTF website at http://picoctf.com . Email questions you may have regarding the competition to: educator@picoctf.com
David Brumley Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon Universitydbrumley@cmu.edu