Our hacker wins Cyber Challenge EMEA Finals
Vlad at the final in Russia
Remember, we had the Russian Symantec Cyber Challenge final here and a conference on information security, at which a simple American guy Kevin Mitnik spoke enchantingly? So, then v0s won , who went to Nice to represent our country in the final round.
Even in Moscow, he was very impressed by the experts' speed - he went ahead with a huge margin, managed to calmly watch all the plot scenes and go for a little bite to eat during the tournament.
All in all, he won the EMEA Cyber Readiness Challenge Final . And shares his impressions.
The participants. Compared to the players at our finals, ours are usually younger.
More finalists
Technical Area
V0S:
In general, the event was incredible, really worthy rivals from all over the world came. What surprised most of the finalists for a long time professionally working in the field of security, many have their own business. Everything is in suits, and I'm in a T-shirt and shorts :-D Accordingly, the players were also 5-10 years older than me in age.
Unlike the Moscow stage, here I was not familiar with anyone in advance, and it was infinitely interesting to talk with people professionally engaged in information security, who also really rummaged in many areas at once - after all, they went to the finals.
Medals
The number of tasks went in descending order: there were almost 100 flags in the online round, like about 40 in the Moscow qualifiers. In the final there were 23 flags, of which, by the way, the last three were impossible to take :-) A joke from the organizers - before these with three flags they wrote something like “well, the next three tasks are protected by the product from Symantec, try hacking aha”.
In the end, in 4 hours of the game I took 19 flags out of 20 solved.
Symantec came up with an unusual way to reward participants: in addition to the main prizes for 1, 2, 3 places, small awards were also given out for all sorts of gaming achievements: first take 5 flags, first go to the next level, etc. He took everything except the award for the first 5 flags - they managed to pass them ahead of all the high-speed Italian Paolo Perrucci. He ended up taking 3rd place.
Award Hall and dinner
Vlad with a medal and organizers
In general, everything was done nicely and with love for the players. A hotel on the coast with sea views, a competition in the exhibition complex, an award ceremony in a prestigious restaurant and interesting rivals. It will be remembered for a long time :-)
Cup and medal
And the beach in October
Second and third places were taken by Andrea Minigozzi and Paolo Perrucci from Italy, respectively.
You can read about our final here officially , but here from the participants themselves .