Dos Pueblos High students win hacking competition

The Dos Pueblos High School hacking team took first place in a national competition.

More than 2,000 teams competed in the hacking competition. The challenge was to fix a robot that crash-landed on earth and uncover its secrets.

The information inside the robot was encrypted. The students had to use computer forensics and other computer science skills to get information from the robot.

“You were given the code for farcing whether the serial number for the robot is correct and using that you need to reverse what a valid serial number would be,” said Dos Pueblos High School junior Andrew Dutcher.

“This competition was designed so that young people could get practice in computer security. When you get practice at hacking, you are better at defense of people who want to hack into websites,” said junior Delia Bullock

The team of five students earned $8,000 for their school. Team members will split $4,000 and $1,000 in Amazon web services.