Scottish pupils make a strong showing at this year’s CyberFirst Girls competition

A cohort of Scottish pupils have demonstrated their code-breaking prowess by securing their semi-final spot in a competition created to tackle the lack of feminine illustration in just the industry.

The CyberFirst Ladies Level of competition, run by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), is a contest for women amongst the ages of 12 and 13, competing in groups of 4, who are willing to place their digital expertise and codebreaking abilities to the exam in a prospect to be crowned the UK’s champions.

Pupils from 9 Scottish schools have progressed to the semi-final, wherever they will get on rivals from across the nation.

In buy to coincide with the International Day of Girls and Girls in Science (11 February), the NCSC highlighted the robust nationwide participation in this year’s version of the contest.

“We’re pleased to say that thousands of ladies came ahead to compete in this year’s CyberFirst Girls Level of competition and we congratulate the top groups which now go ahead into the semi-finals,” said NCSC deputy director for Cyber Expansion, Chris Ensor.

“These ladies have opened the door to what could a single day be an interesting and satisfying occupation, where additional feminine illustration is undoubtedly desired,” he reported, including that the NCSC owes “a unique thanks to lecturers who encouraged pupils to take up this pleasurable prospect to interact with – and with any luck , be inspired by – cyber security”.

The dwelling nation and English regions semi-finals are scheduled to choose put on 19 March 2021, adopted by the Grand Last on 26 April.

The NCSC described that 6,500 girls nationwide took spot in this year’s qualifying round, which lasted for 10 days right up until 3 February, with teams from extra than 600 faculties. Just about every challenge aimed to take a look at skills in cryptography, knowledge analysis, and dilemma-solving.

Participants ended up presented a collection of short assessments, some of which integrated decrypting encoded passages and analysing uncommon opinions on a message board for clues about their origin, as very well as calculating how extended would it just take to crack a 12 character password.

Since its start in 2017, around 37,000 girls have taken component in the CyberFirst Ladies Levels of competition. The contest aims to deal with the gender imbalance and underrepresentation in cyber security, an marketplace the place it is approximated that only one in 5 personnel are woman.

Some elements of this report are sourced from:
www.itpro.co.uk