The North-West University’s (NWU’s) School of Computer Science and Information Systems secured third place in the Cyber Security Challenge finals hosted by the South African National Research Network (SANReN) during the Centre for High Performance Computing’s national meeting.

Students Heinke Lubbe, Nico kemp, and Aaryadev Ghosalkar took part in the challenge, with honours student Christo Croucamp as their mentor and Prof Lynette Drevin as facilitator.

Prof Drevin explains that the competition is geared toward university students with an interest in information security fields such as penetration testing, incident response, digital forensics and security training.

‘‘Capture the Flag and Blue team/Red team challenges (in which teams attack other teams' servers while protecting their own), as well as social engineering were among the ethical hacking challenges that students took part in,” says Christo.

From Left are Heloise Pieterse, SANReN sponsor representative, Christo Croucamp, mentor, students Nico Kemp, Aaryadev Ghosalkar and Heinke Lubbe, and Dr Renier van Heerden, SANReN cybersecurity manager.