By Daniel Manetin

Lockheed Martin’s CYBERQUEST competition, hosted annually across the globe, drops cybersecurity students into a high-pressure competition where precision and teamwork are required to top the chart and win. Teams from different high schools race through different cybersecurity challenges, ranging from digital forensics to encryption, each needing a unique approach and mindset. Last week, four teams from IA participated in this competition at Lockheed Martin’s Marietta location, putting together both knowledge and especially teamwork, even earning second place in the Marietta location.

As noted by Jairaj Chahal [11] of team Sentinel Cyber, one of the biggest challenges was not starting tasks, but completing them. “We could always get started and find a really close answer, but we could never exactly get it done,” he noted. To stay organized, the team “split up and conquered, so we had two people working on forensics, two on cryptography, and one person kind of coordinating,” Jairaj explained, adding that “teamwork was a really important part of it.”

This is a consistent challenge brought about competing teams. As Ian Russell [11] of second-place team The Hackstreet Boys described, there were a variety of categories, and “The easier category was more like forensics… but some of them were also reverse engineering where you had to unpack everything and figure out what the code meant.” Some problems would prove especially challenging, especially ones “you wouldn’t have thought of haivng [hints] in the prompt.” Despite that, the team relied on teamwork and communications, such as “a shared chat, and if we were stuck on one, we would just work with each other to solve it.”

CYBERQUEST can seem (and be) quite intimidating with its premise and pressure on teams, but it is also a highly valuable opportunity for cybersecurity students to test their skills, pursue their interests, and even explore Lockheed Martin’s facility and job opportunities. The competition provides a great foundation for students to showcase their skills to the world (and even tour the production floor) in a way that not only entertains, but provides a helping hand to students searching for career choices in the cybersecurity field.