Mount Si club takes 13th in international cyber security competition

After working until 5 a.m. on Sunday, Nov. 6, the Mount Si Siber Defense Club claimed the title of highest-placing U.S. team in School Capture the Flag 2016, an international cyber security competition. They placed 13th overall in the Russia-based competition.

The Siber Defense Club, headed by volunteers Loren Eubanks and Stephen Kangas, has been operating for three years, but was not recognized as an official Mount Si High School club until this year, when student participation increased.

Mount Si senior Andy Kirby said the group originally started as a computer science club. The Siber Defense Club later changed to start teaching students about online security, data communication and networking, and to start competing in online competitions to test their skills.

Donavan See, another senior in the club, said that through his three years as part of the group, the work they do became a hobby for him.

“The main part that captured my interest was hacking, but I didn’t understand the whole hacking thing was network security until I really learned about it,” See said.

Stephen Kangas, one of the club’s advisors, said the club saw success once they started focusing on online capture the flag (CTF) competitions.

“The things I believe attract youth into this activity is making a sport out of it,” Kangas said. “It turns out there are a number of online competitions and contests that are targeted to high school students, there are about a dozen of them right now. We are preparing teams to compete in those capture the flag contests.”

For their first competition of the year, the club decided to try School CTF, an event that brings together schools from all over the world to compete in challenges that include breaking into a computer and copying a file (the flag in capture the flag). Teams earn points by copying these files; the total points determine the winner.

“Often times you are trying to break into a network and into a computer and then find a specified file name and those would be the flags,” Kangas said.

“You copy those out and post them on your scoreboard. The challenges keep getting harder. Once you solve a bunch of the 100-point problems you move onto 200-point problems and then onto 300-point problems.”

School CTF, an eight-hour event, was run on Sunday, Nov. 6, in its home country of Russia, but because of the time zone difference, the event began at 10 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 5, for the Mount Si students.

The team was able to make it past the seven-hour mark before they could not solve any more challenges.

“For us it was 10 p.m. through 5 a.m. on Sunday morning, and that’s taking into account our Daylight Savings Time change,” Kangas said. “We watched 1:30 a.m. go by twice that night. We made it seven hours and 15 minutes before we had kids falling asleep.”

The Siber Defense Club was unable to use school facilities at that time of night, Kangas said, but the Snoqualmie Valley Hospital offered the club its conference room. Kangas said the hospital had a good Internet connection, and plenty of room for all of the students to work.

“It was a great experience that otherwise would have been very difficult for us,” he said. “The emergency receptionist came up and brought us coffee at some point.”

The Siber Defense Club closed out School CTF at 13th place out of 82 entrants with a total of 1,800 points. They were also the only U.S. team to make it into the top 15.

Kangas said that while most of the competing schools were from Russia and Eastern Europe, a large amount of participating schools were in the U.S., Canada, Germany, and Mexico.

The winning team was a group from the Ukraine that scored 4,800 points.

The Siber Defense Club also took on another cyber security contest, CyberPatriots, on Friday, Nov. 11. Their work space for that competition, sponsored by the U.S. Air Force, was also at Snoqualmie Valley Hospital, as schools were closed for Veterans Day.

Courtesy Photo The Snoqualmie Valley Hospital offered the Siber Defense Club their conference room. The event ran from 10 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 5, to 5 a.m. on Sunday, Nov. 6.

Evan Pappas/Staff Photo Mount Si seniors Vishnu Rathnam, Donavan See, Preston Henning and Andy Kirby discuss an upcoming competition while club advisor Stephen Kangas answers their questions.