Thomas Jefferson students earn top honors in national computer competition

Thomas Jefferson High School Seniors Bret Barkley and Jonan Seeley recently competed in the PicoCTF national competition. PicoCTF competition is a computer security game run by Carnegie Mellon University and targeted at middle and high school students with college teams participating as well. The game consists of a series of challenges centered around a unique storyline where participants must reverse engineer, break, hack, decrypt and do whatever it takes to solve the challenge. Topics include forensics, cryptography, reverse engineering, web exploitation, binary exploitation, network analysis, steganography and file carving. More than 10,000 teams made up of college, high schools and others competing this year. Bret and Jonan teamed up with players from Stuyvesant High School, tying for first-place in the high school division and taking third-place overall in the national competition.