Cyber Security Challenge Australia
A group of ANU students have achieved some outstanding results in the 2013 Cyber Security Competition Australia (CySCA).
CySCA, organised by the Australian Government and sponsored by Telstra and Microsoft, is Australia's only national cyber security competition and was first held in 2012. The Challenge aims to promote ICT security skills and raise awareness of the importance of cyber security in Australia. This year, 43 teams competed from institutions across NSW, ACT, Queensland, Victoria, SA and WA.
CySCA 2013 commenced at 12 noon on Tuesday 7th May 2013 and ran for 24 hours, and the results are in.
• 5th Place (44 points) - ANU2 (Jarrah Bloomfield, Chanakya Goli, Alex Immig, Caitlin Macleod)
• 7th Place (42 points) - ANU1 (Andrew Donnellan, Andrew Haigh, Jonathan Franzi, Daniel Axtens)
• 15th Place (31 points) - ANU3 (Lewin Hodgman, Nic Donaldson, Ben Bi, Vince Cheng)
The competition tested a wide variety of ICT security skills, including web application security, encryption, social engineering, application code analysis, memory forensics and network forensics.
ANU's teams achieved some particularly noteworthy feats:
• ANU3 was among the first three teams to complete each of the first three web application testing goals
• ANU1 was the 4th out of only 10 teams nationwide to successfully compromise the company's internal network
• ANU1 was one of only 4 teams to successfully decrypt a message that had been encrypted with an insecure key
• ANU2 was one of only 4 teams to successfully decode an obfuscated assembly code payload as part of the network forensics challenges.
Andrew Donnellan, Secretary of the ANU Computer Science Students' Association, said: "This is an excellent result for ANU. Unlike some of the other teams that were competing, none of our competitors had a specialist background in the security area, which is testament to the excellent general analytical skills we've developed during our time here at ANU."
"We would also like to thank the Research School of Computer Science for the generous support they have provided in organising this competition."
For more details on CySCA 2013, including full results, visit cyberchallenge
