Students organise one of the largest hacking competitions ever held in Iceland
The annual IceCTF hacking competition was held on August 12-26 by Reykjavik University and Syndis Information Security Company. The goal of the IceCTF is to raise awareness of security in information technology in a fun way.
James Elías Sigurðarson, Heiðar Karl Ragnarsson and Hlynur Óskar Guðmundsson are all undergraduate students and RU's School of Computer Science. The also have part-time positions at Syndis and so were the perfect candidates to organise this year's competition. The IceCTF's founder, Dr. Ýmir Vigfússon, assistant professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Emory University and assistant professor of Computer Science at RU, was on hand to give good advice to the three students.
The organisers: James, Heiðar and Hlynur.
Around 1600 teams from all over the world and more than 3000 participants battled for the first prize. The competition required the teams to be have the same mindset of cyber criminals, or hackers, and learn which faults not to make in order to stop hackers to access a computer system. Teams from the two largest universities in Iceland, University of Iceland and Reykjavik University were in the top two spots, with the UI team beating the RU team in the end.
The winners: MegaByte from the University of Iceland with dr. Yngvi Björnsson, dean og RU School of Computer Science.
