9 October 2019 – First-year Computer Science student Ho Jie Feng and his teammate Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) student V S Ragul Balaji won first place at the 10th Singapore Cyber Conquest competition held on 1 October this year. The pair won an all-expense paid trip to cybersecurity conference Black Hat USA in August 2020.
Second-year Information Security student Ngo Wei Lin and first-year student Computer Engineering student Daniel Lim placed second in the competition and won S$600 in Challenger vouchers. The competition is organised by the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore as part of Singapore International Cyber Week 2019.
A total of 37 teams of two consisting of tertiary students from both Singapore and ASEAN countries competed in the Capture-the-Flag competition. Each team had eight hours to tackle offensive and defensive challenges and accumulate the most number of points. Students were tested on cybersecurity skills such as penetration testing, security operations and cryptography.
“There are two parts to the competition: a red team (attack) and blue team (defense) challenges. Red team challenges revolved around finding vulnerabilities in the server and navigating these vulnerabilities to gain control of the server. Blue team challenges include detecting malware and threats in the network – we had to detect and extract data,” said Jie Feng.
“This competition was different from the usual CTF competitions as the organisers added a twist to it and teams had to think out of the box,” said Daniel, on behalf of his team. “At the start of the competition, we had quite a low score compared to the other teams and we were demoralized. However, we chose not to give up and managed to play catch up after we understood the system. It was rewarding to see our efforts pay off when the results were finalized and we were announced as second place winners.”
News mention:
CSA Singapore, 1 October 2019
