Sowmya Ravidas, Savita Seetaraman and Sreepriya C., who just graduated with BTech degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from the Amritapuri campus won the top honors in InCTF 2013, beating 150 teams that participated from all over India.

Organized by the Amrita Center for Cybersecurity Systems & Networks, InCTF is a unique national-level, capture-the-flag style ethical hacking contest in India.

“A team captures one flag when they successfully identify and hack a vulnerability in the application of an opponent, while at the same time defending their own application through secure coding practices,” the trio shared.

The top three teams that captured the most number of flags were awarded certificates and cash prizes. The organizing team included Mr. Arvind S. Raj, Mr. Bithin Alangot and Mr. Seshagiri Prabhu.

But this was just one in a long string of achievements that came to Sowmya, Savita and Sreepriya during their final year of studies at Amrita.

The three were selected to attend a prestigious one-month course on Business Entrepreneurship in Tel Aviv University where they even had a seminar by the University President, Dr. Joseph Clater.

“The size of Israel is not very different from the size of Kerala. Yet all major multinational companies like Microsoft, HP, Google have their presence in Israel. Tel Aviv is second only to Silicon Valley in nurturing the most number of technological advancements,” they commented.

The three were among only seven students who were selected from India. There were also students from some of the best universities in the US including Harvard, Cornell and Ohio State University.

The final feather in their cap came when the trio qualified for the India4EU scholarship that will now sponsor them for pursuing their higher education at universities abroad.

Sreepriya and Savita will proceed to the University of Trento, Italy while Sowmya will go to Aalto University, Finland.

They believe that their involvement in the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Club at Amrita helped them a lot. “As a part of this club, we organized many sessions and mediated discussions with people working in some of the top companies in the world. Apart from learning, we also had ample fun,” they shared.

The students were mentored by Vipin Pavithran, Assistant Professor, Amrita Center for Cybersecurity Systems & Networks and expressed their gratitude to him for helping them all along the way.