Informatics students finish first in a national cyber security competition

Informatics students Wojciech, Jorge, Gwion, Jamie, Alexander and Konstantinos won a Capture The Flag competition organised by Deloitte.

The team won by quite a significant margin but their competitors were very strong and at some point got close to beating them to it.

The team members admit that probably the most outlandish challenge was one where they had to manually read a magstripe card by pouring iron oxide dust on it, then taking a photo and manually decoding the bits, in order to finally convert the binary data into the flag using a 7-bit magstripe encoding of the alphabet - the team solved it just before the end.

I can wholeheartedly recommend CTFs as the single best way to learn cybersecurity or even computing in general for anyone looking to get into these topics. They're also great fun (especially when you win)! Personally, after graduating I plan to work in security research.

I’m the beginner on the team but by being surrounded by the super talented members of SIGINT I have been able to learn the ins and outs in a relatively short period of time. If you’re interested in security but are unsure how to get started I can’t recommend the society enough!

 Some members of the team are not newbies when it comes to participating in cybersecurity competitions: they competed in CyberCenturion and Cyber Security Challenge UK before.