World's Biggest Student Cybersecurity Games Widen Scope to Teach High School Students Digital Forensics

BROOKLYN, N.Y., Sept. 16, 2015 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The world's biggest student cybersecurity games—New York University Cyber Security Awareness Week (NYU CSAW)—are about to get a whole lot bigger as organizers re-engineer the High School Forensics Challenge to introduce thousands of young investigators to the field of information security.

For the first time this September, the preliminary round will adopt a fast-paced format borrowed from the iconic NYU CSAW Capture the Flag (CTF) hacking contest that attracts tens of thousands of participants worldwide.  The CTF and the digital forensics challenge are just two of the six contests that will bring hundreds of high school and collegiate finalists, their mentors, recruiters, and top academics and professionals to the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering in Brooklyn for the 12^th annual NYU CSAW November 12-14, 2015.

To introduce novice high school students to the skills they will need, NYU cybersecurity undergraduate and graduate students worked with mentors to develop self-guided online education modules, and they will offer real-time guidance through webinars. 

"We originally conceived of the CSAW High School Forensics competition as a means to engage students at a young age in an exciting area of computer science," said Professor Nasir Memon, NYU CSAW founder and chair of the NYU School of Engineering Department of Computer Science and Engineering. "The initiative has proved very successful, and we are pleased to be scaling up our outreach this year through the open-source CyFor education modules and a new contest format."

Winners from every state will be recognized, and 10 high school student teams from across America will win trips to New York where they will join hundreds of undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students competing for the final round of NYU CSAW.

The stakes are high: More than $450,000 will be awarded in scholarships for high school finalists alone, plus cash prizes for university winners. In addition, all finalists interact with some of the top students as well as recognized professionals and academics.

Other highlights of the 12^th annual NYU CSAW will include:

• The world's only hardware hacking and protection contest will address real-world insecurities of digital voting. In the Embedded Systems Security Contest, students will research how the vote tally of a homomorphic encrypted system could be corrupted.
• Organizers of the CTF are designing 48 hours of preliminary challenges September 18-20 that are accessible to beginners yet challenging to professionals. (Only 15 U.S. undergraduate teams will advance to the finals, where the 36-hour software hackfest is, by contrast, legendarily difficult.)
• The NYU Brooklyn campus will once again become the epicenter for top young researchers, as graduate and doctoral students whose work has already been published in respected journals and conferences vie for the distinction of Best Applied Research Paper.
• Policy Competition entrants will address one of the most controversial debates in information security: Should government institute bug bounties like tech companies already employ to encourage independents to reveal flaws in their digital systems?
• This year's fast-paced gameshow, Homeland Security Quiz, will focus on control systems and go high-tech as contestants compete using a new tablet app.
• Brendan Hannigan, general manager of IBM Security, will serve as keynote speaker for the welcome reception, and the featured speaker for the awards ceremony will be Neil Herschfield, deputy section manager for the Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response.
• Turning the tables on other career fairs in which students petition employers, more than 20 of the most prestigious tech employers will be eagerly seeking CSAW finalists and Greater New York area students with cybersecurity backgrounds for internships and full-time positions. 

Sponsors for this year's NYU CSAW are Gold Level—U.S. Department of Homeland Security; Silver Level—IBM, which will also host the welcome reception and a networking event for CTF and High School Forensics finalists; Bronze—Facebook, FireEye, Navy Civilian Careers-U.S. Navy, NCC Group USA, Oceans Edge Inc., Palentir, Palo Alto Networks, Qualcomm Inc., Raytheon, Two Sigma, and Yelp; Supporting Level—Accuvant, Cubic, Cypher Tech Solutions, Intel Corporation, LIFARS, MITLL, PWC, Rakuten Loyalty, Sandia National Laboratories, and the U.S. Secret Service.

For more information or to register, visit https://csaw.engineering.nyu.edu.

Did you know…

• The personal information for nearly half of all U.S. adults was hacked in 2014, according to the Ponemon Institute and CNN.
• Security breaches are growing: 77 percent of security professionals saw more attacks in 2014 than in 2013, reports the RCA Conference and ISACA.
• More than 209,000 security jobs are unfilled and postings are up 74 percent over the last 5 years, according to Peninsula Press.
• The cybersecurity industry will suffer a staffing shortage of 1.5 million people by 2020, forecasts Frost & Sullivan for the trade group (ISC)². 

The NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering dates to 1854, when the NYU School of Civil Engineering and Architecture as well as the Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute (widely known as Brooklyn Poly) were founded. Their successor institutions merged in January 2014 to create a comprehensive school of education and research in engineering and applied sciences, rooted in a tradition of invention, innovation and entrepreneurship. In addition to programs at its main campus in downtown Brooklyn, it is closely connected to engineering programs in NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai, and it operates business incubators in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn. For more information, visit http://engineering.nyu.edu.  
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