The South African National Research Network (SANReN) team hosted its 8th Cyber Security Challenge (CSC) competition during the Centre for High-Performance Computing (CHPC) National Meeting at Boardwalk International Convention Center, Gqeberha, Eastern Cape from 1 – 4 December 2024. The purpose of the competition is to stimulate interest in network/information security within Southern African tertiary education institutions. Thus, the competition is aimed at university students interested in information security fields such as penetration testing, incident response, digital forensics, and security training.
183 teams (652 students) from 20 tertiary education institutions from South Africa, Eswatini, Malawi, Lesotho and Namibia competed for spots in the final. All teams showcased excellent skills and the CSC committee was proud to welcome the following top 10 teams (36 students) to the 2024 SANReN Cyber Security Challenge final:
- #!/shebang/ – Rhodes University
- I LAK LINUX – University of Pretoria
- D33p_R00T – Namibia University of Science and Technology
- Ctrl Phreaks – University of Johannesburg
- Cyber GNRS – University of Witwatersrand (WITS) – Computer Science
- Chaarows – Durban University of Technology
- Notorius – Central University of Technology
- THE3xplo1t3r – University of Western Cape
- D3CYPH3R5 – University of Cape Town – Engineering
- ByteMe – University of Witwatersrand (WITS) – Engineering
During the competition, the above teams were exposed to the following cybersecurity challenges:
- Jeopardy-styled Capture the Flag (CTF) event which assessed the critical thinking skills of participating teams by requiring them to complete challenges that replicate real-world scenarios. The challenges include binary exploitation, cryptography, web exploitation, reverse engineering, digital forensics, and mobile phone security.
- Attack and Defend challenge for team vs. team battles. Here every team has their own system that consists of dedicated preconfigured hardware and software. In the Attack/Defend competition, the teams must hack each other but also fix vulnerabilities in their own system (through patching).
- Orange Cyberdefense sponsored a unique cyber security challenge focusing on application programming interfaces (API) vulnerabilities and security. APIs are often used in the development of web applications and, therefore, necessitate the understanding and testing of such APIs to ensure the security of web applications. This challenge also exposes teams to the art of penetration testing.
- MathWorks/Opti-Num Solutions sponsored a unique cyber security challenge focusing on the utilisation of machine learning classification algorithms in a MATLAB environment to identify cyber security attacks in collected network data. This challenge was expanded this year to include a component requiring teams to model their own Intrusion Detection System (IDS).
Participating teams and mentors were also introduced to lockpicking (for educational purposes of course) as the patience and perseverance required to pick a lock are often reflected when working in cybersecurity.
The competition came to a successful conclusion on the 4th of December and the winning teams were announced during the Awards Ceremony.
Cyber Security Challenge (CSC) Competition – Overall
First Place: I LAK LINUX – University of Pretoria
Second place: D3CYPH3R5 – University of Cape Town (Engineering)
Third Place: ByteMe – University of Witwatersrand (WITS) – Engineering
ISPA Inspires Education Sponsorship
The Internet Service Providers’ Association (ISPA) Social Development working group embarked on projects working towards the development of South Africa’s youth. A key project is the ISPA Inspires Educational Sponsorship, which is an initiative supporting young individuals pursuing a career in the ICT Sector. As a sponsor for the SANReN CSC 2024 Competition, ISPA awarded one educational sponsorship to a promising young CSC participant to achieve their ambitions of working in the ICT industry. The receiver of the ISPA Inspires Educational Sponsorship was Gcinwayinkosi Jula from the University of Cape Town (Engineering) will be continuing with his BSc (Eng) in Electrical and Computer Engineering (2nd year) in 2025.
NEC XON Internship
NEC XON partnered with the CSC this year to identify an individual who possesses the “Hacker Mindset”, someone who demonstrates an insatiable curiosity and an unquenchable thirst for understanding systems, networks, and the intricate dance of code. As sponsors, NEC XON will be awarding a 12-month paid employment package to an earmarked CSC finalist with the option for permanent employment based on the 12 months’ performance, passion, consistency and personal development. The recipient of the NEC XON 12-month paid employment package was Shaun Beautement from the University of Cape Town (Engineering).
SANReN Attack and Defend Challenge
Sponsored Challenges
API Challenge (sponsored by Orange Cyberdefense) was I LAK LINUX – University of Pretoria.
MATLAB Classification Challenge (sponsored by MathWorks and Opti-Num Solutions) was ByteMe – University of Witwatersrand (WITS) – Engineering.
Sponsors
Much appreciation goes to our Cyber Security Challenge 2024 Sponsors
