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Drone hacking

East Lycoming students take first place in competition

Proving they could out-hack and out-fly five other teams, three East Lycoming High School students brought back the first place trophy at Bloomsburg University’s first ever drone hacking competition.

The competition, hosted by Bloomsburg University and sponsored by the Army, tasked teams with hacking a drone to take control of it and piloting that drone through an obstacle course.

When the news of the March 24 event made its way to East Lycoming, Adam Creasey, the district’s director of technology, began looking to make a team. To Creasey, the district did a great job in making its students aware of the new event.

“The students didn’t come to us and say do you know of any drone competitions,” Creasey said. “We as a district provided to the students something they may never have seen or heard of.”

Soon East Lycoming High School had its first drone hacking team. The team, consisting of senior Kade Heckel and juniors Eric Karschner and Zachary Butler, spent a month practicing for the competition by researching different hacking methods and practicing flying drones provided by the school. According to Creasey, Eric Karschner was unable to attend the actual competition but had been a vital part of the process.

“I was amazed by how little involvement I had to have,” Creasey said.

During the first round of the competition, the first two teams were unable to hack the drone and Curt Jones, an organizer for the competition and chair of the Department of Mathematical and Digital Sciences, asked the East Lycoming team if they felt that they could do it.

“I asked the gentleman from Hughesville if they were OK and they were pretty confident,” Jones said. “I could tell they had things under control. They were able to hack into the drove in roughly a minute and 10 seconds.”

After gaining control of the device, the team flew the drone through the obstacle course in record time. More teams were able to gain control of the drone and fly it, but the East Lycoming team had the fastest overall time against the four college teams and one other high school team.

“Some of the teams could hack into the drone and do it faster but the Hughesville students flew it faster,” Jones said.

When the competition was over, the organizers decided to have one last mission for the two best teams. One drone was placed on the field and both teams tried to hack it and take it through the obstacle course.

“The other team got control of the drone first,” Heckel said. “We shut it down in mid-air and made it crash into the ground. We had to tell them that we shut the computer off in the drone.”

The Hughesville team had practiced and researched a number of methods when it came to taking over a drone, some more complicated than others.

“The different examples of code we were trying to pull together weren’t playing nice,” Heckel said. “We wanted to try something more advanced but we settled for knocking it out of the sky.”

For winning the competition, a part of the university’s third annual BloomCON, all three students received $1,000 scholarships to Bloomsburg University and the Army provided a trophy.

“It was amazing for me to see them come together as a team and utilize each person separately for a common goal,” he said.

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