The Nevada Cyber Club this January finished third in the National Security Agency (NSA) Codebreaker Challenge, an annual competition designed to hone cybersecurity skills. Eighteen Cyber Club members participated in the challenge, which ran from Sept. 16, 2024 to Jan. 17, 2025 and involved solving cryptography and cybersecurity puzzles to test participants’ skills in encryption, decoding and problem-solving.
“Codebreaker Challenge is NSA’s major cyber event for students every year, with over 5,000 participants and over 400 academic institutions,” Matthew Myers, NSA’s academic liaison to the ÐÔ°®ÎåÉ«Ìì, Reno, said. “Finishing in the top 1 percent is absolutely worth celebrating!”
The NSA Codebreaker Challenge provides students with a hands-on opportunity to develop their reverse-engineering / low-level code analysis skills while working on a realistic problem set centered around the NSA’s mission. This year’s scenario involved nation-state sponsored advanced persistent threats (APTs) targeting our defense industrial base (DIB) contractors.
For Nevada Cyber Club team member Kameron Bettridge, the competition was a way to hone skills.
“Codebreakers was definitely an interesting set of challenges, as they focused on two areas I am the weakest in: cryptography and reverse engineering,” Bettridge said. “Tasks five and six were cool, as they both showed that even tiny mistakes in cryptographic implementations or usage can lead to encrypted messages and data being decrypted or forged.”
Reverse engineering is a crucial skill for those involved in the fight against malware, advanced persistent threats and similar malicious cyber activities. As the organization tasked with protecting U.S. government national security information systems, NSA is looking to develop these skills in university students and prospective future employees.
