Telstra chief information security officer, Mike Burgess
Telecommunications giant, Telstra, is set to host a competition to find the next crop of cyber security experts from the nation’s university students.
The company said that despite a growing need for cyber security professionals, in government and the private sector, there remains an IT security skills shortage in Australia. To help raise awareness, Telstra is hosting a 24 hour Cyber Security Challenge.
Cyber Security Challenge Australia 2015 has been described as a ‘hacking’ competition run by an alliance of Australian Government, business and academic professionals committed to finding the next generation of Australian cyber security talent.
Tertiary students from across the country will compete over 24 hours from 12pm till 12pm Thursday. Teams compete from their home campus while Telstra will administer the game from Sydney.
In its third year, the event will feature 64 teams from 23 tertiary institutions around Australia have entered. Students in teams of three and four are given 24 hours to complete a series of set tasks involving a fictional network.
Teams will be tested various categories including forensics, network analytics, and cryptography as well as cracking hashes. Points are awarded at the end of 24 hours and the team with the most points wins.
The winning team will travel to the US and NZ later this year to attend the prestigious Black Hat Security Conferences. Telstra has recruited participants from the previous two events.
In conjunction, the Australian Cyber Security Centre Threat Report 2015 has also outlined the trends expected for the remainder of this year and beyond, they are:
- The number of state and cyber criminals with capability will increase.
- The sophistication of the current cyber adversaries will increase, making detection and response more difficult.
- There will be an increase in the number of cyber adversaries with a destructive capability and, possibly, the number of incidents with a destructive element.
- There will be an increase in electronic graffiti, such as web defacements and social media hijacking, which is designed to grab a headline.
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