Trend Micro has hosted its 6th annual UAE Capture the Flag (CTF) Competition, which provides hands-on experience to nurture the talent of more cybersecurity professionals.
The UAE hosted 10 teams and 24 players. The winning team Alt-Backdoor advanced to the Arab and Africa regional virtual finals, with up to 15 national winners going head-to-head.
Alt-Backdoor were Ababhair, Mohamed Khaled, Rami Altai, and D.P. In 2nd place was Shades, with Mohamed Ammar, Omran Alhosani, Hassan Al Ali and Sultan Murad AlBloushi. In 3rd place was V@Ni$hers, with Murad Smretaeb, Amir Abdella, Gherebrhan Weldit, and H.
The Trend Micro CTF 2020 – Raimund Genes Cup is being run as a fully online event for the first time, including virtual qualifying and final rounds. Teams from around the world are invited to test their skills across several critical areas of cybersecurity, especially those experiencing talent shortages or facing targeted attacks.
In the UAE and Arab World, Trend Micro held the CTF Competition in partnership with CyberTalents, an online platform that ranks cybersecurity professionals. CyberTalents is running the CTF Competitions to give participants visibility with recruiters, and to act as a bridge between talent and stakeholders across the cybersecurity field in the MENA region.
The UAE and Arab and Africa CTFs were virtual Jeopardy-style CTFs. For every challenge solved, the team will get a certain amount of points depending on the difficulty of the challenge. The team who got the highest score at the end of the day was the winning team.
This year, the event includes challenges in reverse engineering, forensics/exploitation, open-source intelligence (OSINT), mobile, IoT, machine learning, and radio-frequency (RF) systems. RF is featured for the first time after a highly successful engagement with the cybersecurity community in separate Capture the Signal events over the past two years.
The virtual Global CTF Finals will take place online on the weekend of December 18.
The winning team from the finals receives 1,000,000 Japanese Yen (approximately $9000 USD). Each player from the winning team will also receive 15,000 Zero Day Initiative Rewards Program points, to help them earn exclusive awards and benefits. The second and third place teams receive 300,000 JPY and 200,000 JPY, approximately $2,600 USD and $1,800 USD respectively.