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Oops!… We Did It Again

Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah
Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

We think we did it again
We made you believe it’s more than just luck

One year ago, we were proud to announce that the CTF team of the CrySyS Lab qualified for the DEFCON CTF Finals, which is among the most prestigious hacker competitions in the world. Now, we announce with the same pride that WE DID IT AGAIN: our !SpamAndHex team qualified for the 2016 DEFCON CTF Finals and it will travel to Las Vegas within two weeks to play against 14 other teams and a program (the winner of the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge) between August 4 and 7. Congratulations to the team and looking forward to this extraordinary experience!

By the same token, we would like to express our immense gratitude to our sponsors who made it possible for the team to travel to the competition. They are: Tresorit, BalaBit, Dimension Data, ESET/Sicontact, SEARCH-LAB, MRG-Effitas, Microsec, Hunity Defense, Sophos, Symmetria, TMSI, and BME’s Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics. Below is our team’s T-shirt design showing the sponsor logos. It is heartwarming to witness that our industry partners and our university appreciate our efforts and support the team when we need help.

Sponsors in 2016

You may ask how it is possible that students from a not-so-well-known university of a small country repeatedly achieve first class results at an international level and the 5th position in the world ranking of all hacker teams last year. We assure you that this is not pure luck! Rather, we believe it has something to do with our talent management program in the CrySyS Lab. If you are interested in what is that, then you can read our paper, which has just been accepted for presentation at the Usenix Workshop on Advances in Security Education (colocated with the 25th Usenix Security Symposium in Austin, TX, on August 9, 2016).

If you like what we do and want to help our work on growing talented IT security professionals, please, contact us (by writing to buttyan@crysys.hu).