Holyoke Codes ran a Cyber Security Workshop for Girls Inc. on Saturday, December 8th, 2018 for Computer Science Education Week. The workshop was attended by 21 middle school aged girls, members of The Girls Inc. Eureka Program Rookies group. Eureka! Scholars spend time on the UMass Amherst campus and elsewhere, experiencing lab-based activities in science, technology, engineering, and math.
The girls learned about digital forensics and cybersecurity with topics such as cryptography, steganography, passwords, and privacy to solve a mystery in a Capture the Flag (CTF) contest.  The CTF contest was custom created by Prof. Beryl Hoffman and her Elms College Computer Information Technology students for Holyoke Codes. The contest uses a series of challenges involving cybersecurity concepts to solve the mystery of a kidnapped cat (for a demo, login with team name: test, password: test). Three new challenges were added this year, including one on Dr. Azer Bestavros’ research project on Additive Secret Sharing.

Support for the event was provided by the National Science Foundation CISE SaTC Frontier Award #1414119 to Boston University, entitled MACS: A Modular Approach to Cloud Security.
This experience will also be available via Holyoke Codes workshops open to the public at no charge (www.holyokecodes.org).