Team Romania topping provisional ranking of European Cyber Security Challenge 2019

Team Romania has jumped to the first place in the latest provisional ranking of the European Cyber Security Challenge 2019 competition, with 7,432 points, just 234 points ahead of runner-up Italy, and at 550 points ahead of the third position taken by Austria.

According to the National Cyber Security Incident Response Team (CERT-RO), live score counting for the 20 participating teams is discontinued, with the final results to be announced on Friday, October 11, at the award ceremony to be held at the Palace of the National Military Club.

Adding to the current scores of the competitors will be the marks of the specialist jury, to be awarded to the competitors after they go through a series of specialist presentations.

According to the intermediate results published on the official website of the competition (https://europeancybersecuritychallenge.eu/leaderboard), Germany ranks 4th (with 6,420 points), Poland is 5th - with 6,098 points, the United Kingdom is 6th - with 5,826 points and France 7th - with 5,484 points.

Bringing up the rear are Switzerland - with 2,914 points, Luxembourg - with 2,044 points and Liechtenstein - with 1,774 points.

Competitors from 20 countries participate in the 2019 edition of the European Cyber Security Challenge (ECSC) competition, at Parliament Palace in Bucharest, October 9-11. 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 national team of Romania, coached by cybersecurity expert Ioan Constantin of Orange Romania, is 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.

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.

Romania was twice European cyber security vice-champion, in 2016 and 2017. In the first edition of the competition, organised in 2015 in Switzerland, the Romanian team ended fifth.

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.