31 youngsters selected to be part of Romania's preliminary team for ECSC 2020

A number of ten youngsters passionate with cyber security will participate in the European Cyber Security Challange - ECSC, to take place in November, in Vienna, to be selected from 31 youngsters passionate about cyber security representing Romania's preliminary team for this event.

According to the organisers of the national selection stage of the competition, the first phase was carried out exclusively online between 9-10 May.

"This national stage of the ECSC 2020 represented a preselection of candidates for the preliminary group of Team Romania, and 31 youngsters, 15 juniors and 16 seniors, passionate about cyber security have been selected as finalists. The national competition takes place in two stages. The initial online preselection process will be followed by an additional stage, in which the youngsters will be tested in CTF (online) competitions and, afterwards, trained during a bootcamp, through exercises in the area of web application security, cyber attack and defence, cryptography, network traffic analysis, reverse engineering and presentation skills. At the final phase of the competition, each participating country will be represented by a team of 10 competitors: five in the 16 - 20 age category, five in the 21 - 25 age category, respectively," the website of the national competition mentions.

The first phase of the national stage was organised by the National Association for Information Systems Security (ANSSI), the National Cyberint Centre with the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI), the Romanian National Computer Security Incident Response Team (CERT-RO), Orange, Bit Santinel, certSIGN, Cisco and KPMG Romania.

AGERPRES National News Agency is the media partner of the event and institutions of the academia supported, encouraged and promoted the registration for this cyber security competition, at European level: the University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest, University of Bucharest, the "Ferdinand I" Military Technical Academy, the Police Academy, the West University of Timisoara, the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, the "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" University of Iasi, the "Gh. Asachi" Technical University of Iasi, the "Stefan cel Mare" University, Suceava, the "Aurel Vlaicu" University of Arad and the "Ovidius" University of Constanta.

For the first time, Romania won the title of European champion in the European Cyber Security Challenge 2019 competition, which took place over October 9-11, at the Palace of Parliament in Bucharest.

Italy and Austria came second and third, after Romania. The final ranking continued with: Germany, UK, Poland, French, Estonia, Denmark, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Greece, Spain, Norway, Ireland, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Cyprus, Liechtenstein and Luxembourg.

It is the first time when Romania tops the European ranking of cyber security experts, after it came out twice an European cyber security vice-champion, in 2016, in Germany, in Dusseldorf, and in 2017, in Spain, in Malaga.

The European Cyber Security Challange (ECSC) is an initiative of the European Union Agency for Network Internet Security (ENISA) and it is part of the Action Plan for the Implementation of Cyber Security Strategy of the EU.

This year, the ECSC will take place in Vienna (Austria), between 4 -5 November.

According to ENISA calendar, the competition will be organised in Prague in 2021, in Norway in 2022, and in Italy in 2023.