Richmond students tackle cybersecurity contest

MacNeill Secondary students are participating in CyberTitan, a national contest on cybersecurity hosted at Richmond Virtual School.

The students have been part of a B.C. pilot program to learn about cybersecurity, in partnership with Palo Alto Systems and IBM Canada.

The multi-day contest is giving students a chance to test their skills in preventing cybercrime.

And, with Canada and the world facing a critical shortage of cybersecurity talent, the school is providing students the opportunity to fill this skills gap.

The students score points by finding and fixing vulnerabilities in their images, which range from simple (giving users strong passwords) to much more complex.

If they take an action that makes a system less secure, they lose points. Some rounds also include networking challenges in the form of quizzes and tracer activities.

Teams can also gain points by answering forensics questions about actions they took to solve their vulnerabilities.

Richmond was one of five teams from B.C., with two more rounds to go on Monday, according to Richmond Virtual School’s Gary Chan.