The Romanian representative was ranked 1st in the European Cyber Security Championship (ECSC) 2019, the podium being completed by Italy (2nd place) and Austria (3rd place). The sixth edition of ECSC, organized for the first time by our country, brought together teams from 20 states, consisting of young students passionate about cyber security, who fought for the big trophy.
Romania was present at the European Cyber Security Challenge 2019 with a group of 10 young people, between the ages of 16 and 25, selected from over 300 potential competitors: Robert Vulpe (captain), Florian-Robert Dobre, Dragoş Albăstroiu, Ioan Dragomir, Mihai Dăncăescu, Cristian Done, Matei Bădănoiu, Alexandru Top, Tudor Moga and Mihai Cioată.
The list of countries registered in the competition, held in Bucharest from October 9 to 11, has been completed by Austria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Switzerland, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Holland, Norway, Poland, Spain, Portugal and the United Kingdom.
The final ranking resulted from participants taking tests in areas such as web security, cryptography, reverse engineering and investigations, programming, Linux / windows / macOS security, mobile and IoT security.
ECSC, an event held at the initiative of the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA), is a competition in which our country has prevailed in previous editions. Thus, Romania managed to obtain the title of vice-champion in 2016 and 2017 and in 2015 and 2016 was designated by the jury as having the best exposure of the way in which it solved the tasks in the competition.
ECSC 2019 was organized by the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI), CERT-RO and ANSSI, in partnership with Orange, Bit Sentinel, certSIGN, Cisco, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, eMag, Clico and Cybertas, and with the media support of AGERPRES and Digi24.
Romanian cyber security companies – certSIGN and Bit Sentinel – had a special role in the organization of this year's edition of the European Cyber Security Challenge, being actively involved in the smooth running of the event. With over 12 years experience in developing cyber security solutions, certSIGN – with the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at Bucharest University – has supported the Romanian team at ECSC 2019 by participating in the pre-selection stages, supporting cryptography training sessions within the nine-day bootcamp concluded at the end of September and carrying out part of the tests proposed for the participants in the final stage of the competition.
The seventh edition of ECSC will take place in Vienna in 2020, where we hope the Romanian representative will win again!
