Team from Informatics wins national Cyber Security Challenge again
Joshua Green, Harvey Stocks, Wojciech Nawrocki and Antonio Guterres have won the Scottish University Cyber Challenge.
This is a second year in a row that a team from Informatics won the challenge.
The students are members of SIGINT, the student Cyber Security group in the School of Informatics. They were the first team to finish all of the day 1 challenges, and they did it within just two hours.
They admit though that the first day challenges came as a surprise: they were focused entirely on escaping a series of restricted environments, something they had little practical experience with. They had to spend much of their time searching online for guidance but it paid off: they were the first team to finish all of the challenges.
The first half of the second day was a more conventional Capture The Flag exercise. This consisted of different categories of challenges (forensics, cryptography, reverse engineering). Thanks to a well-balanced team, consisting of members with expertise in different areas they placed first in the second day, too.
Finally, for the last half of the second day they were tasked with a forensic analysis of a memory image from a machine, which had been exploited using the famous ETERNALBLUE exploit (the same one that was used to cripple the NHS during the WannaCry outbreak). Again, they required to do some research to complete this challenge, but bagged a respectable score.
Overall, the team came 1st for the entire competition. This is a second year in a row the team from University of Edinburgh won the challenge and Joshua Green was on a winning team last year, too. Harvey Stocks was a member of a team that came second in a C2C challenge earlier this year.
A team from sister university, Edinburgh Napier placed 3rd proving the Scottish capital is the best place to be when you’re into cyber security.
I’ve always wanted to work in Cyber Security since I attended secondary school it’s a great feeling when you are working on a hacking challenge and you finally get that root prompt after a few hours/days or even weeks.
This is the 7th Cyber Security Challenge event I’ve been to in the past year, and I can undoubtedly say that all have been a great experience. To be crowned Scottish champions the second year in a row is a great end to the year of competitions too, and I couldn’t have done it without such a fantastic team. I’m looking to go into cyber security research once I’ve graduated, preferably low level vulnerability assessment or something malware focused.