Students in Illinois State University’s School of Information Technology will take part in a high-tech game of “capture the flag” beginning on Friday, November 6. The Capture the Flag challenge will test students’ skills in the area of information security.
The event, put on by the School of Information Technology and Systems Department staff members from State Farm, will present a series of hacker challenges for students to solve. Challenges are successfully completed when participants discover a “flag” – a predetermined sequence of computer characters – within a program. Challenges include real-world information security scenarios such as cracking a password, finding information in network traffic, and using open-source security tools to find a flag on a remote system.
Capture the Flag participants will have until Wednesday, November 11 to complete the challenges. An awards ceremony for participants will be held at 3 p.m. Friday, November 13, in Stevenson Hall room 121. State Farm Assistant Vice President and Senior IT Architect Mike Fletcher, along with other State Farm staff, will be on hand for the awards ceremony.
For more information, contact Doug Twitchell in the School of Information Technology at (309) 438-7756 or dtwitch@ilstu.edu.
