Want to learn how to hack? Join the Cybersecurity Club!

The term “hacking” is often attributed to some sort of negative connotation and a skill that is out of reach for mainly everyone. Fossil Ridge High School’s very own Cybersecurity Club disagrees with both of those statements. 

The members of the club practice for the better half of the year to compete in picoCTF, a free computer security game that “consists of a series of challenges centered around a unique storyline where participants must reverse engineer, break, hack, decrypt, or do whatever it takes to solve the problem.” Under the name Cyber-Cats, they placed within the top five percent nationwide, as well as the top nine percent worldwide. 

In the age we live in now, cybersecurity is becoming a bigger part of our future than ever before. “It’s growing really quickly,” the leader of the club, Victoria Mahoney, stated, “The demand is definitely much higher than the supply… mostly because people are scared to teach kids how to hack.”

However, the club does much more than only learning how to hack with the purpose being to understand the real-world skills that would be needed in any cybersecurity field. Although that type of intelligence is considered hacking, the primary goal is to learn how to use your online privilege safely, free from danger.

“We learn how to hack, but we don’t do it in such a way that allows those skills to be used maliciously,” explained Mahoney.

The upcoming competition will allow students to use their newfound expertise to complete challenges that increase in difficulty throughout the given time. “[picoCTF] is like an escape room where you solve puzzles,” Mahoney stated. 

While these skills are not something that people naturally have, the club is accepting of beginners and people eager to learn new abilities. The original purpose of the club was to introduce the cybersecurity world by using the competition as a way to teach in a fun and attention-grasping way. 

“I wanted to inspire students to pursue cybersecurity,” Mahoney said, “We are really open to all experience levels. You don’t have to know anything to join,” she continued.

The club also hopes to have a few guest speakers throughout the year including the Head of Security at Intel here in Fort Collins, and even a possible appearance from the Head of Security at Uber Technologies Incorporated. The club encourages students to attend any meetings on Tuesdays after school in room W102 if you are interested.