Cybersecurity, students at Ca’ Foscari members of the Italian team on the European podium

Italy took part to the European Cybersecurity Challenge (ECSC), the main European contest for cyber-defenders, for the very first time and obtained the bronze medal against fifteen countries, after Spain and Romania.

The event, promoted by the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA), is dedicated to young people between 14 and 25 years old. Teams from Austria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Norway, Romania, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

This year’s edition was held in Malaga and included challenging issues such as identifying vulnerability in hardware devices like smart card readers and electronic locks.

Each team was evaluated for their technical skills, their ability to deal with the chosen topics in the framework of digital revolution, with a short but ambitious and broad presentation that included solutions to the challenges that were introduced to them.

The Italian cybersecurity team, "8bITs - get a byte of Italy", was made of three junior team members (14-20 years old) and five senior team members (21-25 years old). The team included the winners of the 2017 edition of CyberChallenge.IT and the senior members of the cyberdefender teams at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and at Politecnico Milano with great experience in international contests in computer security.

The Italian team members were: Pietro Borrello, Qian Matteo Chen, Andrea Fioraldi, Dario Petrillo e Simone Primarosa (CyberChallenge.IT), Marco Festa (team towerofhanoi at Politecnico Milano), and Francesco Benvenuto and Lorenzo Veronese (team c00kies@venice at Ca' Foscari). The team was coached by Marco Squarcina (Ca' Foscari), Francesco Palmarini (Ca' Foscari) and Emilio Coppa (Sapienza), on the jury of ECSC 2017 and trained from October 9th to 12th at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca .

The Italian participation was supported by the Italian Ministry for Economic Development, following the search for talent carried out in CyberChallenge.IT, first project of its kind in Italy. The first edition held in 2017 at Sapienza University in Rome trained 26 young cyber defenders out of 700 candidates, inaugurating a new approach to the defense of Italian cybernetic space developing skills and knowledge in younger generations.

The outcome of the Italian team, trained by a Ca’ Foscari PhD candidate highlights the quality of education and research at Ca’ Foscari in computer security and the talent of the “ethical hackers” of Ca’ Foscari. Find out more about Computer Science and the doctoral programme in Computer Science.