NHS IT Club

Nevada High School IT Club

Current IT Club Officers:

-President: Brian B.

-Vice-President: Mason P.

-Secretary: Cameron G.

The Nevada IT Club exists to educate its members, the community, and the school in matters related to computers, networks, and information technology in general. Our primary focus is in learning to set up and maintain secure networks, servers, and programs following the best cyber-defense recommendations available from the IT industry. We are recognized by the School Board as a student organization in the Nevada School District. Our By-Laws, approved by the school board, are available for review here.

The Nevada High School IT Club will be open to any registered student of the Nevada High School who is receiving a passing grade and is interested in the objectives of the club and willing to uphold its policies and subscribe to its By-Laws.

Information Technology is proving to be of vital importance to today's world. While the Club is no replacement for a computer-oriented curriculum, it is a good preparation for that curriculum, for those members who are interested in a career in IT. And for those who are interested in computers but not a career in IT, it' still an opportunity to learn how computers and networks work.

Importance of IT

Recent headline show how important IT is becoming to our Government and Military...and what’s important to the Government and the Military will invariably lead to good careers in both the public and private sectors defending us against the myriad of security threats we’re just coming to recognize:

-Webhost hack wipes out data for 100,000 sites
By Dan Goodin in San Francisco
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/08/webhost_attack/

-Anti-U.S. Hackers Infiltrate Army Servers
By Paul McDougall, InformationWeek
http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/federal/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=217700619

-Major cyber spy network uncovered
An electronic spy network, based mainly in China, has infiltrated computers from government offices around the world, Canadian researchers say.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7970471.stm

-Senate Legislation Would Federalize Cybersecurity
Rules for Private Networks Also Proposed
By Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus, Washington Post Staff Writers
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/31/AR2009033103684.html

What We’ve Been Doing

The Club has assisted Ann Malven in setting up and maintaining the school’s computers, and in helping community members solve their computer problems. We’ve created a web site template which we can use to help other School organizations set up their own web sites. For the past two years the Nevada IT Club has competed in the annual IT Olympics contest held by Iowa State's Information Assurance Center. The 2009 competition was the world’s largest cyberdefense contest, with 40 teams from high schools across Iowa competing. We were challenged to set up a network consisting of a firewall, an email server, a web server, and a remote desktop server, and to make those services available to a set of users while simultaneously defending that network against hacking attacks by ISU professors and graduate students.

In Conclusion

If there’s one thing the IT Olympics competition has taught us, it’s that there’s a lot more to be learned. We’ve built an extensive library of IT books covering topics such as Linux administration, Apache Web Server, DNS (the technology that converts http://www.nevada.k12.ia.us/ to the computer address that the internet understands), Network Security, and more.