“Cyber0ids”, a team representing the students from Amrita School of Engineering, Chennai Campus, was ranked 40th among the 680 teams that took part in the Tamil Capture The Flag (CTF) 2021, a cybersecurity competition, organised during September 26-28, 2021, with the objective of encouraging learners and professionals in the field of cybersecurity, information security, and ethical hacking to demonstrate their skills.

The main categories/domains of the Tamil CTF were web exploitation, PWN, reverse engineering, forensics, cryptography, and OSINT. The members of the winning teams were: Sanjai Siddharthan M (III BTech Computer Science Engineering), Shraddha Chopra (II BTech, Cyber Security), Dhanvinesh K (II BTech, Cyber Security), Aghilan A (II BTech, Electronics and Communication Engineering), and Jyothika Prakash Nambiar (II BTech, Cyber Security). In total, three teams from Amrita School of Engineering – Chennai Campus took part in the competition.

In her comments about the best performance of the students, Dr Sreedevi said, “It is heartening to see our students winning competitions in cybersecurity, the skills of which are useful to make computers, and computer networks safe. We encourage all our students, irrespective of their engineering branches, to know the ways of safeguarding their data from cyber threats. Participating in CTF competitions help students gain invaluable experience and insights into cybersecurity. The team members of “Cyber0ids” collaborated and worked on their domains of interest – their passion and team work has paid off. This event is one among many others our students have already won. We look forward to equipping our students to participate in several other competitions and to bring laurels to themselves and the institution.”

In cybersecurity, CTF stands for Capture The Flag. It is a fun way to learn ethical hacking skills, hands-on. Tamil CTF 2021 was organised by Tamil Cybersec Community, a not-for-profit association dedicated to creating awareness about the field of cybersecurity especially among the Tamil society. The contest was sponsored by IT and cyber security firms: Hack The Box, Replit, Root Me, Pentester Labs, Burp Bounty, Google Cloud, and Infosec House.