undergraduate

On July 27 and 28, the ISITDTU CTF 2018 qualifier round took place at DTU, with 300 teams from all over the world. Then, on September 9, 50 young and talented students from the top 10 Vietnamese teams returned to compete in the ISITDTU CSF finals. DTU was the only university in Vietnam authorized by CTF Time to hold this international online information security contest.

Dr. Vo Thanh Hai, DTU Vive-Provost, said: “The demand for Information Security education has increased. Cybersecurity contests are rarely held in Vietnam however, due to the lack of facilities. Building on years of success in national information security contests, DTU has been allowed to run the 2018 ISITDTU CSF. The contest is aimed to identify outstanding IT students for extra, special intensive training, in order to increase the number of experts in this field.” 

For ten hours non-stop, the teams solved online information security problems, based on the “jeopardy” format, including PWN, REVERSE, CRYPTO, WEB, MISC topics, focusing on attacking their opponents and seizing their network resources whilst protecting their own.

The OpenToAll team, from Vietnam National University in Hanoi, scored 10,780 points and won the first prize of 10 million dong. Second prize went to the z3r0_n1ght team from FPT University with 8,787, and third to the Lotas team from the Academy of Cryptography Techniques, with 7,841. 

Nguyen Ngoc Nam, a student from the Danang University of Technology, said: “I was able to meet and exchange information and ideas with others from all over the country. We want to participate in more contests like this one to broaden our knowledge of Cyber Security and become skilled professionals enforcing national network security.”