ECSC2019/ Romania becomes European cyber security champion for the first time

Romania has just won the title of a European champion in the European Cyber Security Challenge 2019 competition, which took place over October 9-11, at the Parliament Palace in Bucharest.

The distinctions were granted to the Romanian team and the other countries at the Award Gala held on Friday evening at the National Military Centre in the Capital City.

Italy and Austria came second and third, after Romania. The final ranking continues with: Germany, UK, Poland, French, Estonia, Denmark, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Greece, Spain, Norway, Ireland, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Cyprus, Liechtenstein and Luxembourg.

The national team of Romania, coached by cybersecurity expert Ioan Constantin of Orange Romania, was made up of Robert Vulpe (captain), Robert Dobre, Dragos Albastroiu, Ioan Dragomir, Mihai Dancaescu, Cristian Done, Matei Badanoiu, Alexandru Top, Tudor Moga and Mihai Cioata.

This is the first time when Romania tops the European ranking of cyber security experts, after it came out twice an European cyber security vice-champion, in 2016, in Germany, in Dusseldorf, and in 2017, in Spain, in Malaga.

During the three days of the competition, the finalist teams had to develop and defend an infrastructure. The most important part was the development and defence of its own infrastructure, but attacking the other teams also brought additional points.

The competition had three levels of difficult: hard, medium and easy. The tests covered fields such as: web security, cryptography, reverse engineering and investigations, programming, attack and defence, security Linux/windows/macOS and mobile phones security.

Competitors from 20 countries participated in the 2019 edition of the European Cyber Security Challenge (ECSC) competition. Romania has lined up a team of 10 young people.

On the list of the competing countries are Austria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Switzerland, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Spain, Portugal and the United Kingdom. At the same time, two countries are present as observers of the competition, namely Finland and Malta.

The European Cyber Security Challange (ECSC) is an initiative of the European Union Agency for Network Internet Security (ENISA), this year in its sixth edition. The competition started in 2015, according to the Plan for the Implementation of the European Union Action Cyber Security Strategy.

The event in Bucharest is organised 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. The AGERPRES National News Agency and Digi24 private broadcaster are media partners.

According to ENISA, next year's European cyber security competition will be held in Vienna. ECSC will travel to Prague, in 2021; Norway in 2022, and Italy in 2023.