Southampton Team win National Hacking Challenge

A team of three Southampton Students has won a GCHQ sponsored national challenge to hack a purposely built website beating over 250 participants in teams from 11 top UK Universities.

The competition, open to all Universities accredited by GCHQ as “Academic Centres of Excellence in Cyber Security Researchâ€? (ACEs) was run in conjunction with Cambridge University and involved attacking and defacing a specially prepared website. The Southampton team of David Young, James Prance and Josh Curry managed the task in the first day of the challenge.

This success follows the individual and team bronze medals won earlier in the year at Inter-ACE 2016 competition and sets high expectations for Inter-ACE 2017 in March next year.

Professor Vladimiro Sassone, Director of Southampton University’s Cyber Security Centre, said “I am very proud to support students capable of such quality in their exploits. In order to maintain our performance at this level, we will recruit more team members for the Inter-ACE challenge in March. Our students in the Cyber Security Centre are very active in external competitions and challenges and we in the centre recognise their value in driving standards upwards. In January we will organise internal workshops and challenges among current students to select more high-quality team members. I firmly believe that this result demonstrates the quality of our education programme in cyber security. Southampton produces students of the very highest calibre in cyber security, so if you’re interested in undergraduate MEng, postgraduate MSc or research PhD in cyber security don’t forget to apply to Southampton.â€?