UNSW team takes top spot in national cyber challenge

A team from UNSW has won the fifth Cyber Security Challenge Australia (CySCA).

The four University of New South Wales graduates have been awarded a trip to DEFCON 2017 in Las Vegas this July.

Teams from Victoria’s Monash University and Western Australia’s Edith Cowan University completed the top three in the 79-team nationwide white hat hacking competition.

The 24-hour challenge held earlier this month tested the cyber penetration and forensic analysis skills of the students, who had to perform capture-the-flag type tasks for a fictitious business.

The aim of the challenge is to help government and business to find the next generation of local cyber security talent, Minister assisting the Prime Minister for cyber security Dan Tehan said.

“The record number of participants and the skills on display demonstrate Australia is developing a talent pool of up-and-coming cyber security professionals which will be essential for a digital economy,” Tehan said.

“The Challenge exposed students to the wide range of careers available in cyber security and showed some of the nation’s most sought after employers the level of talent coming through our tertiary institutions.”

CySCA was last held in 2015 when it was also won by a UNSW team.

This year’s challenge attracted the corporate sponsorship of PricewaterhouseCoopers, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Cisco, Telstra, Facebook and Microsoft as well as security and data firms HackLabs and Splunk