Up all night fighting off hackers

AMES, Iowa -- These high schoolers will have permission to stay up all night playing a computer game.

Students from 10 Iowa high schools will spend 15 hours playing the security crew for a fictional dot-com startup company in Metropolitan, Iowa. The students' job will be to design a computer network that will keep hackers from attacking the company and its work creating databases.

And then they'll have to stay up all night defending that network from a team of Iowa State University students posing as hackers.

It's all part of Iowa's first High School Cyber Defense Competition. The competition starts at 7 p.m. Friday, May 19, at Iowa State's Internet-Scale Event and Attack Generation Environment. The electronic action ends at 10 a.m. Saturday, May 20. The event is free and open to the public.

Full story:
Iowa State University News Article

heh, there will be a lot of bruised egos on both sides before that one is over.

still, unless the database have to have a online pressence, i would just pull the ethernet cable out of the box and leave it at that

hmm... so how much thinking outside the box do the rules cover? Could the "hackers" send some thugs to intimidate a "security" guy into cooperating. Maybe they could storm the building in ski-masks and paint guns, tie up the kids and hack at will...

Outside the box would be fun.

"Hey, is that a chopper I hear?" and "Was that gunfire?"

Or in true SR style, this 'test run' actually ends up masking a real run aimed at the site.

Wow, wish I knew about this. Sounds fun!