National Cyber Security Competition session kicks off at SQU

MUSCAT: The orientation session of Oman National Cyber Security CTF Competition hosted by the SQU Information Systems Department started on Monday. Winners of the competition will qualify to play in the Arab Finals in December. The CTF will be a Jeopardy style where every team will have a list of challenges in different categories like reverse engineering, web security, digital forensics, network security and others. For every challenge solved, the team will get a certain amount of points depending on the difficulty of the challenges. The team who will get the highest score at the end of the day will be the winning team. The winner team will get ticket and accommodation to travel to Egypt to compete with other regional teams. More information and competition registration can be found at: https://cybertalents.com/. The site also has several exercises that participants can practice and prepare for the competition.

The competition orientation sessions were held in different colleges and universities in Oman between September 25-28. The completion online qualification will be during October 26-28, and the final round will be held in November 11 at Sultan Qaboos University.

The competition is organised by Cyber Talent and Arab Regional Cyber Security Centre, and hosted by Oman CERT, with Micro Trend strategic partner and the Information Systems Department, at CEPS, SQU as the supporting partner. Dr Mohammed al Fairuz, the SQU focal contact of the competition, indicated that this contest allows students to get hands-on cyber security. It is an opportunity for the students to demonstrate their skills and apply their knowledge in scenario-based challenges. He also added that CTF is a world recognised competition, and exposing Omani students to such contest will help organisations to identify the players’ strengths and therefore ease the procurement process accordingly.

Dr Kamla al Busaidi, the Head of the Information Systems Department, said that hosting the final round of Oman National Cyber Security CTF Competition is to promote awareness and knowledge sharing in the cyber security and information systems security field among students in SQU and Oman.