Britains Top Code Breakers & Teens

Defense company Raytheon has teamed up with The Smallpeice Trust and several major security bodies to locate Britain’s most talented hackers in a 720-school competition. Four pupils from the Grimsby Institute of Further & Higher Education were named the new Cyber Security Challenge Schools champions at Cyber Games 2.0 in Cheltenham last week. The 14-17 year-olds were given the task of cracking encoded systems and freeing a hostage trapped within a secret location in Cheltenham College.

The  Cyber Security Challenge Schools Programme, now in its second year, is funded by the Cabinet Office, and delivered in association with Bletchley Park, CompTIA, eskills UK and others.

James Jackson, programme leader for Computing at the Grimsby Institute said the Institute’s students are actually more familiar with hardware-based tasks.

Vincent Blake, head of cyber at Ratheon, says that the firm’s ambition is to “instil the seed of cyber creativity within each of the participants”.