Cybersecurity Competitions
picoCTF is a free computer security game targeted at middle and high school students, created by security experts at Carnegie Mellon University. The game consists of a series of challenges centered around a unique storyline where participants must reverse engineer, break, hack, decrypt, or do whatever it takes to solve the challenge.
Cyber Quests are a series of fun but challenging on-line competitions allowing participants to demonstrate their knowledge in a variety of information security realms. Each quest features an artifact for analysis, along with a series of quiz questions. Some quests focus on a potentially vulnerable sample web server as the artifact, challenging participants to identify its flaws using vulnerability analysis skills. Other quests are focused around forensic analysis, packet capture analysis, and more. This Cyber Quest covers a wide range of topics on networking, including firewalls, routers, Wi-Fi, and packet analysis.
CyberPatriot is the National Youth Cyber Education Program created by the Air Force Association to inspire K-12 students toward careers in cybersecurity or other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines critical to our nation's future. At the core of the program is the National Youth Cyber Defense Competition, the nation's largest cyber defense competition that puts high school and middle school students in charge of securing virtual networks.
Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) was created to encourage the reporting of 0-day vulnerabilities privately to the affected vendors by financially rewarding researchers.
There are a lot of Capture The Flag (CTF) competitions nowadays. CTF is a special kind of information security competitions touching on many aspects of information security like cryptography, binary analysis, reverse engineering, mobile security, etc. There are three common types of CTFs: Jeopardy, Attack-Defence and mixed. You may find upcoming CTF competitions from CTFtime.
The International Capture The Flag ("iCTF") is a distributed, wide-area security exercise, which aims to test the security skills of the participants. It is the world's largest and longest-running educational hacking competition that integrates both attack and defence aspects in a live setting. The UC Santa Barbara iCTF is held once a year. It is a multi-site, multi-team hacking contest in which a number of teams compete independently against each other.
The National Cyber League (NCL) is a biannual cybersecurity competition for high school and college students. The competition consists of a series of challenges that allows students to demonstrate their ability to identify hackers from forensic data, break into vulnerable websites, recover from ransomware attacks, and more. Students compete in the NCL to build their skills, obtain scouting reports of their performance for hiring purposes, and to represent their school.
The Cyber Security Awareness Week was founded by NYU Tandon Engineering School and is now celebrated around the world. With locations in North America, the Middle East, Europe, and Asia, the event is the largest student-run cyber security event in the world. Part of each year’s events include the prestigious capture the flag. Additionally, an applied research competition, embedded security challenge, and policy challenge are present.