Loudoun Students Organize Cybersecurity Summit, Contest | Education
Loudoun Students Organize Cybersecurity Summit, Contest | Education
Publish Date: 2026-06-12 22:22:00
Source Domain: www.loudounnow.com
Using an unordered list, summarize the following article with between 4 and 8 key points.
A group of Loudoun County Public School students organized two cyber-based events this semester that they hope will become annual gathering places for area students interested in computer science and cybersecurity.The two events, CyberSummit and IndyHax, were held at Independence High School in May and June.IndyHax, a combined hackathon and cybersecurity competition, asked students to complete challenges and build projects based on a prompt to compete for points and win prizes, according to Lalith, one of the student organizers. Tarushv, another student leader, said the event drew students from around Loudoun County as well as Chantilly High School and Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, both in Fairfax County.2026 is the inaugural year for both events. Tarushv said the events were “pretty well-received” and that students, parents, and professionals in the industry have thanked them for organizing these types of events, which the students said are much more uncommon for high schoolers than college students and professionals. Lalith said the prizes in this event set it apart from many high school events.Technical expertise was not the most important thing for participants, he said. “We were looking for people who know how to innovate. We were looking for people who know how to change the world,” he said. Projects developed in response to the prompts included games, apps, and other programs. One project that organizers gave as an example was a program that pulled from Washington DC crime statistics to create a map of the city showing which areas were safe and which were more dangerous. The group of students who created that program were inspired to do so after being followed by suspicious individuals while in Washington, and Tarushv said that shows that they recognized a problem and wanted to fix it.Of course, AI came up in the conversation. Tarushv said there’s a lot of discussion in the cyber world about whether AI will take away jobs for entry-level cybersecurity professionals, and being able to get practice in high school and have that on a resume allows students who attended to have a leg up when applying for jobs down the road.Building community was another objective for the organizers. Dheeraj, another organizer, said, “some other schools, they bring things that our school doesn’t have, so making those connections is a really important part of these events.”The students hope to open the event to students from more of Fairfax County in the future and hope that, down the road, students will come from across the commonwealth. CyberSummit, which brought experts to the school to speak to the high school students, might be combined with IndyHax in the future to make it one large two-day event, the students said.“We want to expand on this event, we want to make this really big,” said Dheeraj. Lalith added, “next year, I really want to open this up to all of Virginia. … We want to spread awareness, spread knowledge in Northern Virginia.”These skills and events are becoming even more important as AI advances and the world becomes more polarized, the students said. Lalith said students need to know both cybersecurity and programming skills in today’s world, especially since many programmers are using AI to create code, which often leads to cybersecurity risks that might not be recognized by someone who knows about programming but not about the security side of the industry.Funding for the events came from sponsors that the students cultivated, including the George Mason University cybersecurity department and two cybersecurity companies. Those sponsorships allowed the winners to take home prizes like projectors, speakers, monitors, and iPads.Learn more here.
