Between 13 and 14 October, Kuban Cyber Security Conference 2022 was held in Krasnaya Polyana, Sochi. Students of the Faculty of Computer Sciences took third place in the KubanCTF information security competition.
Kuban Cyber Security Conference served as a platform for a dialogue between representatives of governmental authorities, business, experts, and younger generation concerning cyber security. The conference was attended by representatives of Russian and international companies. It was organised with the support of the government of the Krasnodar Region.
The conference opened with a welcoming speech by Deputy Secretary General of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Janesh Kain. The conference involved round table discussions and presentations by cyber security departments of corporate and public companies. The key issue discussed at the conference was the prevention of cyberattacks on critical infrastructure.
The conference also included a competition in information security KubanCTF. It was the fifth competition this year. It was participated in by 10 teams, which had already competed in various CTF competitions. The ONO team from the Faculty of Computer Sciences was among the participants. It consists of:
- Yulia Shishko (1 year master’s degree student)
- Vladimir Ushakov (2 year master’s degree student)
- Nikita Berezhnov (1 year PhD student)
- Lev Khakimov (4-year bachelor’s degree student)
The competition was task-based. The participants had to solve as many various tasks as possible within a set time limit. All the tasks concerned various fields of information security: forensics (computer forensics), reverse engineering (understanding the initial code of the programme based on its files and search for vulnerabilities), web (exploitation of the vulnerabilities of websites and servers), OSINT (collection of data gathered from open sources), and PWN (binary exploitation).
The team from the Faculty of Computer Sciences scored 2,400 and took third place. It was awarded with a certificate for 50 thousand roubles.
“Our faculty pays a lot of attention to training students for academic competitions. The teams are coached by the lecture from the Department of Programming and Information Technologies, Dmitry Solomatin We organise extracurricular classes for talented students and make sure they take part in summer schools on information security and programming”, said Alexander Krylovtsky, Dean of the Faculty of Computer Sciences.
The faculty holds an annual regional competition in information security VrnCTF for university and school students. In 2022, the faculty’s team ONO was one of the organisers of the event and was responsible for the technical support. The team members also act as tutors for freshmen who want to take part in competitions.
Information security is taught to all students at the faculty. There are also two specific academic programmes: Information Security for bachelor’s degree students and Computer Security for specialist’s degree students.
