In light of breaches like the one Equifax saw, a lot of young people are looking at a careers in technology and cyber security to help stop them.
A Maryland law firm is handling the class action lawsuit against the company saying it took too long to inform customers.
At this year's Johns Hopkins Hophacks event, students from across the country brainstormed their best hardware, software, ap and cyber security ideas that could one day prevent a hack of this magnitude.
The challenging 36-hour event is designed to test their computer skills that aren't learned in a classroom.
"A lot of times in class, you're assigned very limited scope things that teach the concepts well but they don't innovate at all," said competitor Gary Qian.
While the competition involves all aspects of coding, programming, ap creation and other ideas--the growing cyber security problem has become a focal point for aspiring tech experts.
The Equifax incident that happened and all the cyber security that's happening of late, it's a really big topic there's a lot of jobs in that market that students are pursuing," said student organizer, Jason Yim.
Companies and consulting firms give students data to test out their ideas about not only cyber security issues, but other possible tech problems and advances as well.
"We have one sponsor giving them data of different hacks that happened throughout the us and they're expressing their ideas to solve these problems," Yim said.
And innovation is what the students, who may be the future creator of the next Twitter, Facebook or cutting edge cyber security technology are seeking.
"Teaching this generation how to combat that sort of thing is really important and events like these can help to do that," said Eden Metzger.
The Hophacks competition runs through Sunday. Students can win various cash prizes from sponsors like Bloomberg, Siemens and Google.
