Strong suit of sponsors, DHS, Yahoo, Facebook, NSA and the Secret Service among them

Aug 26, 2014 10:02 GMT  ·  By

Registration for the annual student hacking competition hosted by the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering, is open for participants across the globe.

Dubbed Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW), the final round of the event is slated for November 13-15.

It accepts competitors from high school through doctoral programs, who have to compete in preliminary rounds for a spot in the finals of the six competitions prepared by the organizers. Rewards consist in scholarships and various prizes.

Among the six competitions, there is Capture the Flag designed for finding ways for breaking the security of a system and get the protected goods; this is the most popular of the competition events, with qualification round taking place between September 19-21.

There is also a category for forensics analysis, destined for high school students and a section for hardware hackers.

In the announcement for the event registration, organizers said that a new competition had been added, for public policy developed by students.

This year, Yahoo’s Chief Information Security Officer, Alex Stamos, will be delivering the keynote presentation, titled “Shaping the Future: Spies, Cyber Crimes, and Your Career,” on November 13, at the welcoming of the finalists.

“A career in information security has never held so much promise or peril,” Stamos said. “New members of the security community have the opportunity to build systems that bring trust and innovation into the lives of billions,” he added.

The organizers have pointed out that this year there is an expanded CSAW Threads research conference that aims at discussing security scaling for fitting the latest needs for software development and operations.

“In addition to discussions of the latest developments in security automation, CSAW THREADS will feature a demonstration of a novel incident detection and analysis system funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and intended for enterprises,” the announcement informs.

According to the communication from the university, last year’s event gathered more than 15,000 students, showing growing interest from the participants.

Currently at the 11th edition, the event is sponsored by a total of 20 organizations, gold sponsor being the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Yahoo is a silver sponsor for the competition, while the list of bronze sponsors comprises big names, such as Facebook, the National Security Agency, NCC Group North America and Palantir.

Additional companies offering support are FireEye, Intel, Microsoft, MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the United States Secret Service.

It is worth noting that security agencies have a constant presence at security events and hacker competitions in particular.