ECSC 2019/ENISA official Demosthenes Ikonomou: We promote youth opportunity for a career in cyber security

Through competitions such as the European Cyber Security Challenge we want to promote youth opportunity to make a career in cyber security, given that there is a talent shortage in this area in Europe, head of the Operational Security Department of the European Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA) Demosthenes Ikonomou told AGERPRES on Wednesday.

"The European Cyber Security Challenge is a hacking competition, let's say an Olympiad for hackers. It has already been taking place for a number of years and the main objectives of the competition are, on the one hand to promote cyber security talents, and on the other hand to show young people - because you may have noticed that some of these people are quite young, they are 15-16 years old - that there is an opportunity for a career in cyber security. As strange as it may sound, some of them see this only as hobby, as a past time activity. There is a shortage of cyber security talent in Europe. So through such competitions we want to promote the opportunity for young people to make a career in cyber security. As to your question 'Why Bucharest and Romania?' the answer is that every year we select a different host for the final from the participating countries. We were very happy that last year the colleagues from Romania came to us and offered us this great facility to organize the final. This is an indication of the success of the competition, in the sense that in the last couple of years we have registered a huge increase in the number of volunteers who are willing to participate in organizing the final. Usually the European Cyber Security Challenge takes place in October, or at the end of October. The reason for this is that October is the European Cyber Security Month, during which numerous cyber security events are taking place throughout Europe. Therefore, we thought it would be nice to add this event to this initiative," said Demosthenes Ikonomou.

Regarding the quality of the Romanian IT experts, the ENISA official underlined that their level of talent in the field of cyber security is very high.

"I think you can see this in the results of the national teams of Romania in the last competitions. The Romanian team is doing pretty well. For me, the fact that they were not on the top position in the last two competitions is not as important as the fact that they were among the top three teams in the last competitions, as they are. I can tell you from my own experience that this competition has grown exponentially in the last few years, you have to understand that five to six years ago there was a competition among three countries. We now have 20 countries and we have three countries in stand-by which are observing the competition and which are about to enter next year. I can tell you that this competition has also become a competition of resources in a certain sense. There are teams with better resources than others, there are teams that have better facilities for competitions at national level than others, and this is seen in the results. The fact that Romania, even in these games that have become expensive, if I may say so, is up there at a high level says something about the level of the cyber security expertise in this country," he underscored.

A number of 20 countries are participating October 9 through 11 at the Palace of Parliament in the 2019 edition of the European Cyber Security Challenge (ECSC); Romania is present with a team of 10.

The European Cyber Security Challange is an initiative of the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) aimed at enhancing cyber security talent across Europe and connecting high potentials with industry leading organizations. Now at its sixth edition, the event started in 2015 in accordance with the Action Plan for the Implementation of the EU Cyber Security Strategy.

The event in Bucharest is organized by the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI), CERT-RO and ANSSI, in partnership with Orange, Bit Sentinel, certSIGN, Cisco, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, eMag, Clico and Cybertas; the National News Agency AGERPRES and Digi24 are media partners of the event.

According to ENISA data, next year's European cyber security competition will be held in Vienna, the 2021 event will take place in Prague, and Norway and Italy are in talks to host the contest in 2022 and 2023, respectively