Friday, 21 June 2013

Cabinet Office sets up cyber security challenge

The Cabinet Office has set up a cyber security schools programme that will be delivered by Cyber Security Challenge UK and invites secondary school pupils to compete in a national code breaking challenge

The Cabinet Office has set up a cyber security schools programme that will be delivered by Cyber Security Challenge UK and invites secondary school pupils to compete in a national code breaking challenge to demonstrate their potential for a career defending the UK from hackers and computer viruses. The competition will start in September and is designed for key stage 4 students who will break coded messages designed by industry experts and develop their own for other schools to crack.

This is the first schools programme run by Challenge. It will be delivered in association with employers to ensure it tests practical and usable skills that are in demand from industry and is supported by new Cabinet Office funding. The winning team will earn a £1,000 cash prize for their school.

To help teachers spark students’ interest and start to hone their skills, schools who register for the competition will receive a pack of ciphers and code breaking exercises. These will be accompanied by learning support materials and lesson plans that not only teach classes how to crack the codes, but also get them working in teams to develop their own ciphers.

The students’ ciphers will be submitted to the Challenge and points attributed to each by a panel of industry experts, who will judge them on ingenuity and difficulty. The ciphers will then be shared with other schools for them to crack in order to gain further points in the initial virtual tournament. At the end of the virtual tournament the top scoring teams will be invited to a face-to-face final battle at the start of next year to find the first ever Cyber Security Challenge Schools Champion.

The competitions and teacher packs will be made available to over 2,500 schools in the south west through a partnership between the Challenge and South West Grid for Learning. Schools in other regions can take part by signing up on the Challenge website at www.cybersecuritychallenge.org/education

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