By Jeremiah Cook
The Cyber Security Athenaeum Club will compete in the qualifying round for the ninth annual Cyber Security Awareness Week Competition this weekend starting 5 p.m. Sept. 28 in Room 152 of Brooks City-Base Campus.
The CSA team representing Texas A&M-San Antonio is the only team competing from the San Antonio area in the worldwide event sponsored by Polytechnic Institute of New York University. The top teams to place will be flown to New York to compete against each other.
The 48-hour event covers a series of challenges including capture the flag, cryptography, network exploitation, website exploitation, reverse engineering and forensics.
Zach Havins, CSA vice president and business senior, said, “It’s a chance to learn from a real world situation. It’s more than just theory from a book.”
Havins said students are welcome to drop in at the competition and show their support.
Jonathan Garza, Master of Business Administration student, is setting up one of the servers to host Team Fortress 2, a free, online first person shooter game to provide a break from the event and anyone is welcome to play.
Havins said the club will try to stay up all night depending on security’s allowances. The event lasts until Sunday night and the team will be competing in shifts over the duration of the 48 hours.
“If I’m not feeling tired, I will easily go until four in the morning,” Havins said.
Cyber Security Athenaeum Club
The CSA Club is for students who are interested in information security and want to learn and practice the fundamental skills required in the career fields of cyber security.
Havins said students seeking a computer information systems certificate within the School of Business started the club to practice what they were learning in class. The club adviser is Mark Huson, assistant professor of computer information systems in the School of Business.
The club has forums through Google groups. Members who sign up for the forums can ask questions to the club about computer related problems.
Garza said the club offers advice on a lot of things.
“We show what configurations to use if you want to build your own website and give advice on what software we recommend to run,” Garza said.
The club also offers the same services that retail computer repair chains offer including virus removal, hard drive recovery, reinstalling operating systems and reformatting of drives. The club fees for repairs are a fraction of retail cost starting as low as $20.
Havins said that the club has the ability to take in up to three computers at a time to be worked on. There is no limit at Fall Fest, a community event for campus organizations to fundraise, when the club will take in as many computers as they can at their PC repair booth.
The club will be accepting computers 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Oct. 3 and 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Oct. 4. The money raised through computer repair throughout the year and during Fall Fest help fund the club’s servers and test environments where they practice for competitions and pay for competition costs.
“If they can get it here we can work on it,” Havins said when asked if it made a difference whether the computer was a PC, Apple, desktop or laptop.
