NWU students won third place at Cyber Security Challenge finals

Names (From Left): Heloise Pieterse (SANReN),Sponsor Representative, Christo Croucamp (Mentor), Nico Kemp, Aaryadev Ghosalkar, Heinke Lubbe, Dr Renier van Heerden (SANReN Cybersecurity Manager). Photo:  https://www.csc.ac.za/?p=726

SANReN (South African National Research Network) hosted its sixth Cyber Security Challenge during the CHPC National Meeting 2022 at the International Convention Centre, CSIR in Pretoria, from 28 November to 01 December 2022.

The purpose of the competition is to stimulate interest in Cyber Security in the field of network/information security within Southern African tertiary education institutions. The competition is aimed at university students interested in information security fields, for example, penetration testing, incident response, digital forensics, and security training. During the competition, students were exposed to ethical hacking challenges, including Capture the Flag (CTF) Challenges, Blue-team Red-team challenges, where the teams attacked other teams’ servers while protecting their own, and social engineering.

The team from the School for Computer Science and Information Systems, North-West University, participated in the Security challenge and scored third place.

The members were: Heinke Lubbe, Nico kemp, Aaryadev Ghosalkar.

The mentor was Christo Croucamp (Honours student), and the lecturer was Prof Lynette Drevin.