Hacking is allowed within the bounds of the NZ Cyber Security Challenge. Pictured from left are James Baker, Sivaram Manoharan and Christian Richardson at the event, hosted at the University of Waikato on July 14 and 15.

A Hamilton teenager hacks into his school's computer all the time.

"They sorta don't mind it now," James Baker said. "I tell them what to fix."

The Year 13 Hamilton Boys' High School student recently took on a different kind of hacking challenge at the University of Waikato.

He and teammates Sivaram Manoharan and Christian Richardson competed in the NZ Cyber Security Challenge on July 14 and 15.

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They named their team JustTiltEm, a reference to the computer gaming term tilting, where you try to win computer games by annoying your opponents to distraction.

JustTiltEm couldn't really tilt at the challenge, though, because interacting with opponents is against the rules.

It was even against the rules to look at an opponent's computer. And, of course, it's against the rules to hack into the scoreboard, too.

The competition started with an online round in which 267 people from around the country taking part.

This was whittled down to a finalist crowd of 150, who were flown in from as far south as Canterbury to compete at the University of Waikato on Friday night.

Flights were sponsored by Kordia, Endace, ASB, Gallagher, Insomnia, and InternetNZ.

They weren't all high school or tertiary students, either – the competition was open to everybody.

Gallagher software engineer Blake Dawkins has been in the workforce for five years and is part of team Gallagher White Hats, one of three teams made up of Gallagher staff.

"You gotta be careful because if you do it [hacking], you can't really do it often because of the legal implications of it," he said.

"[At the challenge] you get to practise those skills in a safe environment where you can't get prosecuted."

Competitors had to search for traces of a group of hackers, and then defend their system against them.

Dr Ryan Ko, the organiser of the challenge, says this contest is the only one of its kind in the world, because every action taken by hackers is recorded. The winning team was Team Hodor, of Gallagher Group, composed of Sjoerd de Feijter, Matthew Stringer and Vladimir Petko.

"We can find out how attackers behave and how defenders behave," Ko said.

"We are trying to do predictive analysis [and ask]: how do we predict upcoming cyber security events?"