NYU launches largest cyber security student contests

Even before the academic semester starts, students from across the globe have begun registering for the largest set of student cyber security competitions in the world: the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW).

Last year, more than 15,000 students—from high school through doctoral programs—competed in preliminary rounds for a spot in the final rounds of six different competitions. This year, the winners of the preliminary rounds will travel to Brooklyn to compete for scholarships and prizes in the 11th annual CSAW November 13-15.

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

New to this year’s CSAW is a competition for public policy developed by students. Returning contests are the signature Capture the Flag hacking competition for undergraduate students; the Digital Forensics Competition for high school students; the Best Research Paper Competition that accepts only research already presented in peer-reviewed conferences and scholarly journals; the Embedded Systems Security Competition, which tests and secures hardware; and the quick-paced gameshow-like U.S. Homeland Security Quiz.

Also new this year is an expanded CSAW THREADS research conference, which will focus on scaling security to meet the growing demands of 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 DARPA and intended for enterprises.