By Michelle Fong
Seniors Walt Leung and Benton Liu and sophomore Addison Chan participated in the 2015 HSF (High School Forensics) team competition hosted by CSAW (Cyber Security Awareness Week) and NYU (New York University) Polytech School that ended Fri., Oct. 9.
Their team, Big Bobby Tables, was able to reach eighth place in West Coast but was unable to continue onto the final round. Only the first place of every region or the top ten in the country can move onto the final round in New York.
“The hardest part (for me) was decompiling a file and seeing what a file does,” reveals Benton. “What you didn’t know was (the) hard (part).”
For the past few years, HSF was a murder mystery type of competition where competitors reason from the information given and information painstakingly found to deduce the culprit. However, this year it has changed; HSF is now more of a “Capture the Flag” type of competition.
“Competitors race against each other to solve multiple challenges scattered across various topics in cyber security,” explains math teacher and team advisor Stewart Kuang.
This is the third year Piedmont Hills has participated in HSF. The first challengers from PHHS, Class of ’15 Claire Shu and Class of ’13 Rachel Guan and Amy Shu, were able to pass the qualifying round and continue on to the final round.
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