Qualifying Round of the International Cyber Security Championship Started as Part of SPIEF 2023
On 6 June 2023, Moscow. Forty teams from 20 countries will take part in the qualifying stage of the International Cyber Security Championship to be held as part of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum 2023. Apart from cyber security specialists from Russia, teams from Europe, Middle East, Central and Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America have registered for online competition. The broad geography of Cyber Championship’s participants will make the large-scale competition a major international platform for sharing experience in countering cyber threats.
About 200 people will compete to defeat four waves of massive cyber attacks simultaneously. The unprecedented scale of the event is made possible by the in-depth functionality of the National Cyber Training Area’s Solar Cyber World platform.
Participants in the qualifying round shared their expectations of the upcoming competition, as well as how the teams were formed. For example, Miguel Alejandro Marquez Olmos, captain of SUSCERTE’s VenCERT team from Venezuela, believes that the Cyber Championships will allow participants to learn new tools and techniques and contribute to the development of the international IS community. “As we prepared for the Cyber Championship, we explored different exercise scenarios. I believe that a good working team, regardless of the tasks at hand, is formed when there is efficient communication, trust, respect and cooperation among its members. Each person in the team has a role to play, and it is important that they understand their responsibility for the overall result,” emphasized Mr. Olmos.
“The first part of our team will be SOC analysts who will recognize attacks and conduct investigations. The second part will deal with configuring information security tools to prevent attacks. We are interested in getting hands-on experience in an unfamiliar environment when working with Russian protection tools and investigating information security incidents. We think it will be great to be in a no-typical environment and try out our protection methods on a new infrastructure,” shared Maxim Shalygin, captain of VTB Bank’s Your Shell Not Pass team.
Vladislav Kokuntsykov, captain of the GPB ETP team representing Gazprombank’s Electronic Trading Platform, said that for his team, participation in the International Cyber Security Championship is a great opportunity to exchange expertise among specialists in the field, primarily SOC analysts. “I believe there is no limit to perfection in cyber security, and today’s realities encourage us to treat this area with the utmost care. We have divided the roles within the team according to each colleague’s area of focus and paid attention to the interchangeability of each team member.”
In addition to invaluable experience and tense cyber battles, the best participants in the qualifying round will receive useful prizes – licenses for Russian information security products. RTK-Solar will present the finalists with Solar appScreener, a comprehensive software security control solution. Besides, they will receive licenses for products from Cyber Championship’s technology partners – Secret Net Studio by Security Code and Kaspersky Plus by Kaspersky Lab.
Participants in the qualifying round of the International Cyber Championship include representatives from all key sectors of the economy – finance, industry, IT, telecom, transport, public sector, etc. The increased interest in the competition on the part of organizations from various sectors demonstrates that business around the world today attaches great importance to cyber security issues.
