Ca' Foscari's 'ethical' hackers among the best in the world

The ‘ethical’ hackers at Ca’ Foscari are among the best in the world. The Venetian Group c00kies@venice is ranked fifth among 450 participants at RuCTFehttps://ructfe.org/index, one of the most important online computer security competitions, organized annually by the Russian University of Yekaterinburg (Ural Federal University).

The 'game' produced the scenario of a 'cyberwar' in which each team had to defend their own servers and simultaneously attack the systems of the other teams. Ca’ Foscari was first among the Italian groups, third among international university groups, gaining a place in the finals, for the second year in a row, to be held in Russia in 2017.

The Ca’ Foscari team was led by Professor Riccardo Focardi and composed of PhD students Marco Squarcina, Francesco Palmarini and Mauro Tempesta, and also students Francesco Cagnin, Marco Gasparini, Andrea Baesso, Marco Viotola, Lorenzo Veronese, Davide Niero and alumni Claudio Bozzato and Andrea Possemato.

"These races allow the best teams from around the world, both corporate and academic, to compete against each other - explains Marco Squarcina – and they are enjoying an increasing number of participants each year, motivated by an urgent need to face, and know how to prevent, online threats."

The figure of the ethical hacker plays a vital role in verifying the security of a computer system. In order to implement effective protection, it is necessary to fully understand the operation of the involved applications and network infrastructure, and approach the problem as an attacker interested in looking for the weak points of the system to exploit.

The Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics at Ca’ Foscari can count on a research group for cybersecurity, who organize weekly meetings which ‘train’ people to understand the operation of systems and complex applications to identify and exploit vulnerabilities in systems, develop techniques of defense and attack, experiencing crypto-analytic techniques and so on.

The experience gained through years of involvement in this competition allows researchers to provide students of the Master's Degree in Computer Science, specializing in Security with all the tools they need in order to succeed as professionals in Cybersecurity.