Kaspersky announces winners of its annual Secur’IT Cup student competition

Kaspersky has announced the winners of its international competition for students — Secur’IT Cup 2020. Team IP2 from Brazil was named the winner at the final event, which took place online on December 3rd. Teams N0H4Ts from Singapore, AMCET from India, Haythem Elnashar from Egypt and Alex Dolzhikov from the Kyrgyz Republic have also received prizes.

Secur’IT Cup is Kaspersky’s global competition that unites ambitious students from across the world to work on fresh cybersecurity ideas, with the aim of helping to create a safer future. Participants have the chance to win $10,000 and benefit from competing alongside like-minded students to build an understanding of what it is like to work in the industry. This year, the competition was moved online and brought together a record number of participants — more than 1,700 young talents from all over the world.

Students and young researchers with different academic backgrounds showcased their projects addressing the challenges of a rapidly changing world, and tackling security issues posed by new technologies such as machine learning, extended reality and smart homes (5G & IoT). This included software and hardware solution prototypes, pieces of code and a research-based policy, among others. In addition to these main categories, a new stream dedicated to the importance of cybersecurity awareness was added to the competition — security awareness games. Participants who entered this stream were encouraged to create games that would help to increase general users’ security awareness and help them act more safely in the digital world. This stream was supported by technical expertise from the famous video game company Wargaming.

Overall, 24 finalists (single participants and teams) from Singapore, Australia, Egypt, India, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil, and the Kyrgyz Republic took part in the final round of the competition, presenting 10 projects to a jury of Kaspersky and industry experts.

Paulo Fabri and Pedro Fabri (team IP2) won first place in the competition with their project, titled ‘Cyber Clue game’, which is a game designed to increase general users’ awareness about cybersecurity.

Commenting on the win, Paulo and Pedro said: “Cybersecurity is essential in our modern world and for us, what’s better than learning while you a play a game? With that in mind, our project, the Cyber Clue game, for the Kaspersky Secur’IT Cup 2020, allows you to investigate security incidents and solve mysteries based on real life situations. It’s an honor to be able to develop a game in such a short space of time, and being the first team from Brazil to achieve such recognition in the Secur’IT Cup competition. We’d like to congratulate everyone who made this victory possible. We praise all the other participants and their amazing projects, and all the organizers who made this event happen even during the difficult times the world is currently facing.”

Alina Tan, First Mate at Car Security Quarter, Div0, a member of the jury, added: “I was impressed by all the finalists’ presentations as they showed highly innovative and technologically advanced projects — making it a tough choice for the jury to choose the winners. I am sure that the competition’s finalists will have a promising career in the field of cybersecurity, and I look forward to seeing how their projects evolve next year. Congratulations to all the finalists and winners once again.”

Denis Barinov, Head of Kaspersky Academy commented: “Secur’IT Cup is one of the Academy’s signature projects that brings together young talents in cybersecurity from all over the world. This year, we had to run the competition online. This has allowed us to extend the boundaries of the competition, as well as explore new ways of collaboration and networking among both contestants and participants. This year we were able to bring students from 48 countries to this event, further fostering global collaboration among young professionals in cybersecurity. The event will undoubtedly drive innovation in our field forward. I would say that with this event we — literally — did all we could to bring on the future.”

This year there were two runners up and two entrants who claimed third place. N0H4Ts from Singapore with their ‘Drone Monitoring & Takedown System’ project and team AMCET from India with their ‘AMCET: Android Malware Classification and evaluation with Threat Reporting’ project won second prize. They will attend the Kaspersky Security Analysts’ Summit 2021 with all travel expenses paid for them. The third placed projects, ‘Noob to Pro game’ by Alex Dolzhikov from the Kyrgyz Republic and ‘Highly secure digital signature using hybrid system of zero knowledge proofs and GAN data hiding with hardware acceleration’ by Haythem Elnashar from Egypt have received a trip to a local cybersecurity /game development conference or professional course of their choice on one of the global MOOC-platforms.