Most countries lack sufficient IT security professionals to protect their IT infrastructure. To help mitigate this problem, many of them setup national cyber security competitions for finding young cyber talents and for encouraging them to pursue a career in cyber security.
The European Cyber Security Challenge leverages these competitions with a pan European layer to them:
The top cyber talents from each country meet to network and collaborate and finally compete against each other
to determine which country has the best cyber talents.
To find out who’s countries team is the best, contestants have to solve security related tasks from domains such as web security, mobile security, crypto puzzles, reverse engineering and forensics and collect points for solving them.
The competition is organized jointly in collaboration with experienced organizations from EU Member States for students. The Organizing Committee of the 1st pan-European Cyber Security Challenge is composed of the following representatives:
- Cyber Security Challenge Germany Norbert Pohlmann
- Cyber Security Challenge Austria Joe Pichlmayr
- DefCamp Romania Andrei Avădănei
- INTECO Spain Raúl Riesco
- Cyber Security Challenge UK Okonweze Austen
- Swiss Cyber Storm Bernhard Tellenbach
- Demosthenes Ikonomou- ENISA and
- Rafael Tesoro-Carretero- EC DG CONNECT.
Who can participate?
Participants selected by their country’s organization responsible for running the ECSC qualification. In 2015, the following countries can assemble and send a team:
Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Romania, Spain and United Kingdom.
The selected participants should be the top participants from the national challenge and must meet the following criteria:
– They are between 14 and 30 years old
– They are a citizen of the county for which they participate or they live or study there
– They do not (yet) have a master degree or similar
– They do not have a higher education related to cyber security
(e.g., Certified Ethical Hacker, Bachelor in Forensics, …)
Team composition and categories
Teams consist of two (max. 3) coaches/staff members and a maximum of ten (10) contestants from two categories: Junior and Senior. The senior category might not contain more than five (5) members.
Junior: Between 14 and 20 years old
Senior: Between 20 and 30 years old
What are you waiting for?
Join in!
LINKS
Enisa Pan-european Cybersecurity Competition
Read all details about the European Challenge
Introduction to CyberSecurity Cisco Networking Academy
