HR4RS stamp
Núria Ripoll
"More than a hundred people including volunteers, participants and companies will attend the first Capture the Flag competition in Madrid tomorrow," explains Clara Simón de Blas, deputy director of Students and University Extension at ETSII.
From the 'SeekNHack' association they seek to promote interest and knowledge about cybersecurity, a booming branch of technology. Although there are currently national competitions such as the 'AdaByron' or the 'NationalCyberLeague', this will be the first time that an activity of this type is held in Madrid. "Through this activity they will be able to improve their technical skills, establish relationships between students and generate their first contacts with companies in this field," says the deputy director.
The CTF will take place throughout the day tomorrow at the Móstoles campus, and it will have to solve the different technical challenges that will be proposed, for example, forensics, web, cryptography, OSINT, binary exploitation, reversing or steganography among other modalities. The competition will be developed by teams of between three and four members and people between 18 and 26 years old can participate.
“Since it is a competition, students must come with some basic knowledge that will support them in the competition. Tools for forensic analysis, reverse engineering or that help them in the search for open sources” explains Simón de Blas.
From 'SeekNHack' they explain that this first edition arises for several reasons, although the main one is the motivation that exists within the URJC for this branch of computing. However, they assure that the initial idea was to create an 'AdaByron'-style competition but focused on Cybersecurity.
One of the organizers, Carlos Alonso Arranz, a final year student of Cybersecurity Engineering, has detailed how hard managing the event has been for him, “it has been quite an intense experience to which we have had to dedicate a lot of time and combine it with university, work and other activities. Sometimes it has been complicated, but now that everything is ready there is more peace of mind” he points out.
Finally, Alonso expresses his wish that this edition be the first of many, and invites future students to continue with this tradition that they have just inaugurated.