By: Caleb Pierce, Staff Writer
This fall, Wofford’s computer science department has welcomed Dr. Xenia Mountrouidou, known to many students as Dr. X, as a new staff member. Though she is a new face on campus, Mountrouidou has lost no time in becoming connected with students. In fact, she first initiated contact with computer science students in mid-August with an email including a self-introduction and an invitation to join Wofford’s new cybersecurity competition team – the temporarily named WoHackers.
Mountrouidou has always had an interest in hacking, but has only recently begun to coach teams for competitions.
“While I was doing research with a colleague at Johns Hopkins University, he mentioned hacking competitions that his masters students were participating in, so I asked him for more information,” she says. “He talked to me about this competition. After that I got so hooked in it because it was really fun, so I thought that I wanted to do this every year. So that’s how it started.”
This semester, the WoHackers aim to compete in the National Cyber League competition in early October.
“This is our first year, so I don’t think we’re going to beat everybody, but I think this will start a tradition at Wofford – like the ACM competition – the WoCoders,” Mountrouidou says.
“And I think that in a couple of years we can really be threatening when we participate. Right now, we’re going to go under the radar.”
The WoHackers meet once a week in Olin 112A to prepare for the competition. In addition to competition-specific information, the students learn about cybersecurity through basic hacking techniques.
“Defense is a hard thing,” Mountrouidou says. “We learn how to attack in the competition so that the students who learn that can learn how to defend and can learn to recognize an attack and can get to the next step, which is defense.”
The boundaries are set very clearly for the WoHackers, limiting use of hacking techniques to designated machines.
“I even had the students sign that they understand what I explained to them,” Mountrouidou says. “If anybody harms any computer, especially a school computer or anything like that… the consequences can be as high as the student getting expelled from school and also having to deal with legal issues, having to deal with the lawyers of the school.”
If interest in the cybersecurity competition is sustained in the coming years, the WoHackers could be another distinctive feature of Wofford.
“There aren’t many liberal arts colleges that are doing computer security and computer security is becoming paramount,” she says. “So I’m hoping that this little competition will bring some spotlight on the school as being one of the few liberal arts schools that participates.”
Though the invitation was initially extended to computer science majors, other students are also welcome.
“I even believe that students from very different disciplines can participate in the competition, because we need different ways of thinking,” Mountrouidou says.