Cyber camp promotes jobs, pushes digital citizenship

Ah, summer camp. Dips in the lake, nature hikes, toasted marshmallows.

Recalibrating administrator permissions and changing default passwords on routers.

Some vacation experiences are more erudite than others. For 10 North Idaho students, this week’s extracurricular activity is wholly technical in nature.

The middle and high schoolers are in a crash course on cybersecurity at the University of Idaho’s Harbor Center in Coeur d’Alene. It’s part of the Air Force Association’s CyberPatriot National Youth Cyber Education Program, which aims to turn students on to careers in cybersecurity and related disciplines.

“This can bleed into everyday life,” said Simon Miller, the camp’s lead instructor and the technology coordinator for the Kellogg School District. “They can go home and see vulnerabilities, whether it be their parents, or some of these older kids, some of the stuff they do with computers. It’s good to be aware and proactive.”

Early in the week the group talked about digital citizenship – how to be ethical and safe online – including cyberbullying and digital rights. Today they will explore the Linux operating system.

Miller led the group through some best practices in creating passwords on Wednesday. One with six or fewer characters can be cracked in as little as three minutes, but extend the password to nine characters and it would take a hacker about five years to decipher, he said.

He also shared some of the most common – and least secure – passwords, like baseball, shadow, abc123, sunshine, dragon, monkey, iloveyou.

The students learned how to create a honeypot – a trap to detect or deflect unauthorized access of a computer system. That was one of the highlights for Case Larsen, 12, a student at Coeur d’Alene Charter Academy.

Larsen said he likes gaming and coding and is considering a computer-related career. “I just really like computers and I like working with them, so I thought it would be pretty fun to do this camp,” he said.

One of the potential career paths the group learned about is law enforcement. Tami Dirks, a staff operations specialist with the FBI office in Coeur d’Alene, outlined some of the ways the agency uses technology to solve cases, be they terrorism, white collar crime, public corruption or civil rights violations.

“I would bet a million dollars that there’s not one case that the FBI solves today that doesn’t include some type of cybertechnology,” Dirks said.

Computer crimes alone range from spyware and malware, hacking and viruses, to Internet fraud and identity theft, she said.

“I think I have the best job in the FBI ever,” Dirks told the students. “I get to help the analysts and I get to help the agents. I get to plot out charts. A lot of times I’ll plot out who’s involved in a crime on a computer chart, or I’ll plot out different map locations to try to help find where the next crime might occur.”

Miller said high school students definitely are looking at cybersecurity career opportunities.

“We showed them some statistics of salaries and job descriptions, and you could see their eyes light up and go, wow, this looks really challenging and fun,” he said.

The CyberPatriot program, which hosts a national cyberdefense competition, has several teams in Spokane-area schools and soon may expand into North Idaho schools. Young people on those teams get a leg up in their job searches.

“They do successfully in the competitions and they get job offers right out of high school, or some in high school,” Miller said.

The camps and competitions also are a positive way to engage kids in cybersecurity, before they stray into hacking, he said.

“I think it’s a matter of getting discovered the right way.”