The student of DNU knows everything about cybersecurity

According to the version ctftime.org Vladislav Babkin, the student of Applied Mathematics Department of DNU, became a part of Ukrainian team DefCon-UA (dcua), which won CTF championship among more than 12 thousand teams.

In 2012 the team is founded on the basis of the Physical-Technical Institute named Igor Sikorskiy. Mykola Ilyin, the researcher of KPI, is a coach and a leader of the team. The team consists of Kostyantin Ilyin, an advanced student of Physical-Technical Institute of Kyiv Polytechnic Institute (KPI), Viktor Sytnik, the student of the 5th course of Physical-Technical Institute, Mykola Ovcharuk, a graduate of Physical-Technical Institute, Andriy Danylyuk, a graduate of the Institute of Special Communication and Information Protection of KPI, Vladislav Babkin, the master's degree of Applied Mathematics Department of DNU and others. Generally there are 43 participants.

During 2016 65 competitions in the field of cybersecurity took place in the world, where Ukrainian team dcua got 24 winning prizes and held the first place among the world countries in the overall ranking of all competitions. There are teams of all the famous universities in the world lower in the ranking: Carnegie Mellon (Plaid Parliament of Pwning), UC Berkeley, Technische Universität München, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, MIT, NYU, Saint Petersburg RIMO, Lomonosov MSU and many other famous IT-companies.

"White" or "ethical" hackers are usually called the experts that are able to determine how secure the system is against external attacks by cybercriminals and to build its effective protection.

However, the best specialists prefer the term "researchers in the field of cybersecurity" (security researchers), because their goal is not breaking up of computer systems and networks, but research and development of new technologies in this field.

Since 1995 cybersecurity specialists from different countries conduct all-comers competitions where not only the best specialists among themselves are determined, but also they improve their knowledge and skills.

These competitions are held both face-to-face and in online format, moreover the teams can work in different parts of the world. The most common competition is non-stop format with time limit of 48 hours. Participants fight for victory in virtual battles, the purpose of which is "capturing the flag".

The part of information system or the whole one takes place in controlled environment with implemented vulnerabilities. The players have to find it and use to "hack" the system. The confirmation of the system is successfully attacked, is a secret element (a character string of arbitrary format), which is called "flag".

Cybersecurity competitions are held in one of three formats. The first format is called task-based or jeopardy, where the players have to answer several tasks, and the answer is a captured "flag"; the second one is a classical form of attack-protection (classic, attack-defense), where teams get a server or part of a network and should support its functioning and at the same time attack opponents` systems; the third one is mixed format (mixed: h?ckquest, king of the hill, etc.) that combines previous two formats. The last format is the most difficult, because it is closer to reality.

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