Schools to enter cyber security challenge

Thousands of students from the UK will be taking part in a pilot tournament to represent their school, starting in September 2013. Students will be competing to crack and develop online codes, which will enable them to win a top prize worth £1,000. The competition comes after new Cabinet Office-backed cyber security schools program which is delivered by the Cyber Security Challenge UK. Cyber Security Challenge UK is also organizing the event.

The challenge will have key stage four students who need to break the coded messages, which are designed by industry experts and also need to develop their own so that other schools can crack them. The contest will be launched in September 2013 and its aim is to identify the talents of the UK students. In order to help teachers spark the students’ interest, schools that register will get a pack of ciphers and code breaking exercises.

Other than that, schools will also get support material and lesson plans which teach classes how to crack these codes. This way, students will be working in teams in order to develop their own ciphers.

The student ciphers will be submitted to the Challenge and they will receive points from the judging panel, according to their difficulty and originality.