On Saturday 2 April, Upper Sixth Former James Moffat and Remove Formers James Robertson and Muhammed Alom ‘hacked’ their way to first place in the renowned Lockheed Martin CyberQuest Competition. The boys, who competed as a trio (the guideline was five students per team), came first place in the UK, beating the competition by just one point! What made the win all the more satisfying was that this year’s second placed team beat Bedford School to the top spot last year!
The Bedford School boys teamed up to compete against over 300 other students from the US, Poland and across the UK, all of whom were challenged to hack their way into different systems and find security flaws.
The idea behind the competition is to inspire students to study cyber security in greater depth and encourage collaborative working to solve problems.
The competition took place over Zoom, and the boys spoke with cyber professionals at Lockheed as part of the virtual experience.
James Moffat explained, “There was a challenge in steganography which involved finding secret messages in an image, some ‘incident response’ challenges where we had to look through packet captures of network traffic to find information, a couple on forensics, a couple which facilitated the hacking into real systems and a couple on websites that they’d set up.”
It was Mr Scullion, Head of Computer Science, who entered the boys into the competition, although he was not allowed to help with the challenges themselves – the hard part was left to the boys.
Mr Scullion said, “Cyber Security is a hot topic at the moment and something which we see growing and growing. I am hugely proud of what James and James have achieved – against some stiff competition from other schools.”
The boys were thrilled to win, especially as the competition was so fierce. James Moffat said afterwards, “It was unexpected as we were only a trio, whereas the other teams were up to five people so we weren’t sure we’d done enough. The thrill of finally solving a problem you’ve been working on for a while is great.”