October 08, 2013

Student and professor win computer hacking challenge

As an extension of his summer research on computer security education with Professor of Computer Science Jens Mache, Miles Crabill ’16 had the opportunity to attend an invitation-only computer security conference in Dayton, Ohio, from September 15 to 20. On the final day of the conference, Crabill and Mache (along with a student and faculty member from The Evergreen State College) competed against four other teams to win a hacking challenge.

As an extension of his summer research on computer security education with Professor of Computer Science Jens Mache, Miles Crabill ’16 had the opportunity to attend an invitation-only computer security conference in Dayton, Ohio, from September 15 to 20. On the final day of the conference, Crabill and Mache (along with a student and faculty member from The Evergreen State College) competed against four other teams to win a hacking challenge.

Crabill explains that the challenge was based upon the fictional scenario of a zombie apocalypse, and his team was given a mission to “discover evidence that the pretend government had been abusing zombies.” This mission required the team to hack into multiple machines, with the final challenge being to “hack into a machine that had a projector attached, representing an Emergency Broadcast System.” By hacking in and broadcasting their designated message before any of the other teams, Crabill’s team secured the win.

The conference left Crabill with his own trophy and with a new base of knowledge about computer security technologies. As a founder of L&C’s Hacker Club, Crabill will be able to use what he learned to teach fellow students more about computer security.

Katrina Staaf ’16 contributed to this story.

Computer Science