Watching the detectives
Ninety pupils competed in this year’s Cyber Quest contest in the capital, where children learn to fight against criminals’ use of software to gain control of equipment and people’s personal information, Roberta Pennington reports
ABU DHABI // Don’t want to have your cyber security compromised? Then think like a hacker – that was security experts’ lesson for pupils at the Cyber Quest competition yesterday. Children learnt about how hackers penetrate the operating systems of vehicles, infiltrate Wi-Fi networks, control drones and steal people’s personal information by scanning their social media feeds with software.
“If you want to protect yourselves against the hackers, you’ve got to get as clever as the hackers. You have got to see it through their eyes and learn their game,” said Bill Addison, projects officer with the Edinburgh International Science Festival.
The festival designed the interactive cybersecurity workshops for the National Electronic Security Authority ( Nesa), which organised Cyber Quest.
Nesa is responsible for the UAE’s cybersecurity strategy. The workshops and Cyber Quest are the culmination of Nesa’s year-long academic programme in 110 public and private schools. The four- part programme began with experts teaching 11,000 pupils from Grades 6 to 12. Of those students, about 510 of them were selected to take part in the second stage, which involved online training and a week-long boot camp.
A preliminary competition followed, and the top 90 students qualified for this year’s Cyber Quest.
In the contest, teams of three pupils have to solve simulations of common cybersecurity threats.
“They are doing a little bit of everything that we would do as real security practitioners,” said James Lyme, executive director of the Sans Institute, a cybersecurity training firm.
“Part of the hope is that they fig-
‘ There is a growing community of cybersecurity practitioners in the region in that age group, which is the ultimate sign of success of this type of programme James Lyme executive director of the Sans Institute
ure out what they like and what they’re good at.”
The teams can select a challenge from about 40 options. One of them requires the identification of a computer server’s vulnerability. “Their job is to figure out why it’s weak, to get into it to show that they understand the weakness. If they can do that, they can help a business or a government to fix that weakness,” said Mr Lyme.
“It is a real-life set of challenges, or real- life simulation, of what security people do day-today to keep hackers out of important networks.”
Cyber Quest has grown into a national competition since its inception with six schools in Abu Dhabi four years ago.
“The number of skilled practitioners making it through to this point in the competition has increased significantly,” said Mr Lyme. “There is a growing community of cybersecurity practitioners in the region in that age group, which is the ultimate sign of success of this type of programme.”
The number of female participants has increased over the years – they now make up half of the participants. “Technology is everywhere now and we actually need them to be aware of that, learn it, use it and develop a better solution for the future,” said Dr Mohammed Al Kuwaiti, Nesa’s executive director. “The goal behind the whole thing is to identify the most important ones and basically recruit them or send them on a scholarship to some of the top universities around the world,” he said.