This year Amrita InCTF hosted: Beginners CTF, Professional CTF, Women CTF and Hardware CTF. Amrita InCTF also provides participants with the rare opportunity to be interviewed by the prestigious partners of the event for internship and job placements. The event had over 280 students and working professionals from 18 states and 2 Union Territories.
Top 280 finalists were invited to a three-day cybersecurity training with expert talks, hack village stalls and final competition. The hack village stall introduced students to basic car hacking with can protocol used by the automobile industry to communicate among different devices in a low radius region, lock picking, speed patrol time-bound challenges, Wall of Shame- display of vulnerable devices (electronic devices connected to open or public wifi) and code-breaking challenges.
Mr Shajith Moosa, Director of Customer Experience Center APJC (Cisco) was the keynote speaker of the event. The event also had speakers from Amazon, Cisco, VMware, and TBB. The event witnessed talks given by cybersecurity experts such as Mr Ajith Ravindran, Team Lead Cyber Forensic Investigations, Amadeus Software Labs (Talk: Digital Forensics – Beyond the Good Ol’ Data Recovery), Mr Hemal Patel, a successful serial Entrepreneur and Technology Executive (Talk: Cyberoam startup and experiences), Mr Reno Robert, Security Consultant (Talk: Intel L1 Terminal Fault Vulnerability), Ms Sreelakshmi P, Security Engineer, VMware (Talk: Attack surface analysis using a threat model), Mr Vivek N, Lead Engineer – Penetration tester in Schneider Electric (Talk: Exploring attack surfaces in embedded devices), Mr Heeraj Nair, Co-founder and VP of Technology, TheBugBounty (Talk: Getting started with bug hunting) and Mr Shaunak G, Strategic Accounts at Zacco Cyber Security Research Labs (Talk: Understanding a Nation-State Sponsored APT Attack).
Bandaru Vara Prasad (2nd year CSE) of Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies, Telangana and Pranav Krishna (10th class) of CS Academy, Tamil Nadu were the winners of Amrita InCTF and Amrita InCTFj respectively. Mr Survaditya Sur from TCS was the winner of InCTF Professionals, and Sreesruthi PK (2nd year CSE) from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amritapuri campus got first prize for Women CTF. Cash prizes worth 1 lakh were given to the contest winners.
“One of the best cybersecurity events that I have seen in a long time. The level of engagement with the students was great and the event had really good engaging activities”, Mr Shajith Moosa, Director of Customer Experience Center APJC (Cisco).
“Just witnessed an amazing event here and it was great to see really young talent coming here to learn and show strength to fight and solve cybersecurity problems”, Mr Hemal Patel, founder of Cyberoam.
The contest registration started on August 2019. A CTF is a competition designed to challenge the participants to solve cybersecurity-related problems. It is played by students, cybersecurity enthusiasts and professionals alike.
Team bi0s is a student-run CTF team which is the No. 1 CTF team in India who actively take part in the international CTFs throughout the year, besides carrying out research on security issues in the real world. Amrita bi0s has been organizing workshops and educating the masses about the need for cybersecurity. The team has also won national and international CTFs. Amrita bi0s organizes India’s largest Ethical Hacking competition called Amrita InCTF and Amrita InCTF Junior. The team is the No.1 CTF team in India for 4 consecutive years and has been climbing the world CTF ladder reaching to No. 21 worldwide in 2019.
