Trinity success at cybersecurity competition

Trinity Computer Science students Fredrik Ekholm and Euan Ong have won prizes in the 2021 edition of the Country 2 Country Capture The Flag (C2C-CTF) cybersecurity competition. Fredrik was a member of the team that won the bronze medal and Euan was in the team that gained the second honorary award.

Alumnus Dimitrije Erdeljan, now completing a PhD at King’s College, was the top-scoring individual during the qualifiers and also a member of the gold medal team.

There were 155 participants from four continents, arranged in 31 teams. Every team had competitors from several countries and universities. The top score was obtained by eight teams, so the gold, silver and bronze medals were assigned to the teams that reached that top score first; the other five teams reaching the top score received honorary awards.

C2C – originally called Cambridge 2 Cambridge- was created in 2015 by Trinity Fellow Professor Frank Stajano with Dr Howie Shrobe and Lori Glover JD of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and hosted at Trinity two years later.

Professor Stajano, who is Head of the Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research at the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Cambridge, said:

The digital society of tomorrow needs many competent people like these. It is to raise a new generation of cyber defenders and to connect them with each other that we originally created the C2C CTF. The skills acquired and practised by our students during these exercises are those needed to outsmart cyber criminals that attack us from all sides.

Those who excel in this field can be confident that they will always be in demand – and, with my own cyber security company, I regularly offer small well-paid jobs to the top competitors of C2C even before they graduate.

This year the competition took place online hosted by Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology.

You can view the Awards Ceremony on the C2C website.