After ten hours of competition through the night from March 24 to 25, the ISITDTU team from Duy Tan University (DTU) won third prize at the Insomni’Hack CTF finals organized by SCRT S.A.
The ISITDTU team won third prize at the Insomni’Hack CTF finals
The Insomni’Hack CTF finals were held at the Palexpo convention center in Geneva, Switzerland. It is one of the largest annual information security contests in the world.
DTU’s ISITDTU team needed to pass an online selection round of 24 hours of competition. At the final round, the ISITDTU team competed against sixty teams from many different countries around the world: Switzerland, Poland, France, Russia and so on. Among these, about twenty came from universities while the remainder consisted of experts working for network security companies and organizations. The competition format in the final round was Jeopardy with five main parts: web, reverse, pwnable, crypto, and network/forensic.
The efforts by the ISITDTU team from Duy Tan University, yielded a third prize at the 2022 Insomni’Hack CTF finals in the universities section. Previously, the white-hat ISITDTU team already won a lot of prizes:
? eighth at the 2019 Insomni’Hack CTF finals,
? first at CTFtime Vietnam in 2019 and 2021,
? second at CTFtime Vietnam in 2016, 2018, and 2020.
“Everyone in our group spends weekdays playing war games and training our main skills,” Dau Hoang Tai, student and ISITDTU member, says. “At the weekends, we play CTF together. We all often read solutions to challenges from previous contest which we couldn’t solve or blogs with new techniques, after which we exchange, analyze, and recreate new attack techniques until we understand them. Once the contest had started, we actively solved our parts and the team members always helped each other search for solutions. Most important is that our lecturers prepared us with a solid knowledge foundation and guided us towards real-life security issues, making us very confident during the competition.”
The members of the ISITDTU team are students of CMU-standard Network Engineering and Information Security at DTU and, both when studying and when competing, they work together very well.
“DTU has all the infrastructure needed for this major and a lot of technology equipment for practice, especially Open Lab for network security,” the ISITDTU members say about their studies at university. “Students of the major are invariable open-minded and willing to help each other out. The lecturers in particular are always devoted to their students, answer our questions, and show us the way to understand each issue specifically and clearly. Prof. Nguyen Kim Tuan especially has helped the ISITDTU team a huge lot, introduced each of us to CTF, and guided us to take part in contests and win many big prizes.Studying Network Engineering or Information Security at DTU is super interesting. Especially taking part in contests has improved our knowledge and skills and made us all more confident.”
MSc Nguyen Kim Tuan is currently Dean of the Faculty of
Network Engineering & Communications at the DTU School of Computer Science
MSc Nguyen Kim Tuan has many years of experience in information security and network engineering and guides students participating in domestic and international contests to big prizes.
Students under his guidance have left their marks in a great many contests:
? leading Central Vietnam at the Students Information Security Contest for many consecutive years,
? third prize at the ASEAN International Information Security Contest for three consecutive years: 2018, 2019, and 2020,
? second prize at the finals of the 2018 VNPT SecAthon CTF, an information security contest organized by VNPT for Vietnamese experts and students,
? winner of the 2019 Byte Bandit CTF international information security contest (organized by India),
? third prize at the 2022 Insomni’Hack CTF international information security contest (organized by Switzerland).
“Protecting information security in cyberspace is vital for all nations in the 4.0 Industry era,” MSc Nguyen Kim Tuan says. “For Vietnam this is even more important as we are making the digital transition. Demand for human resources in network engineering and information security will therefore be very high for many years to come. DTU made comprehensive investments, from human resources to curriculums and specialized laboratories to train graduates with professional skills. This also shows DTU’s sense of responsibility towards the country’s cybersecurity objectives.
“DTU students are introduced to real-life security issues in their third and fourth years. After being equipped with foundational knowledge of network engineering and administration, they receive in-depth training in information and network security. Building on this, students of Network Engineering and Information Security have many opportunities to become middle or high level workers in information or network security, such as security admin, penetration tester, security consultant, system admin, DevSecOps, or hardening.”
(Media Center)