The winners of the International Cybersecurity Olympiad shared their impressions

Participants of the Russian national team at the International Cybersecurity Olympiad in Singapore on June 27 told Izvestia about their impressions of the event.

"The tasks were actually very difficult and interesting, but in my personal opinion, it's the right thing to do, because it's this factor that becomes a success factor and a factor for further involvement in cybersecurity," said Ildar Khuzhiakhmetov, a student of the 11th grade of the Kazan International School, who took the gold.

The participant also noted the diverse nature of the tasks that had to be completed on the way to the medal. So, the first round was devoted to tasks in the style of the aggressive, attacking side. The second one, on the contrary, was held in a defense format. The stages had corresponding names — Red and Blue.

"Of course, it is important to maintain digital hygiene in general, but for some specific individual things, there was a very interesting task to analyze network traffic logs, which shows, for example, the insecurity of public Wi-Fi networks," Ildar said.

In turn, Maxim Yeronin, a student of the 11th grade of the Moscow State Educational Educational Institution Lyceum of the Second School named after V.F. Ovchinnikov, who took the bronze medal, highly appreciated the tasks for their versatility and depth. According to him, the tasks were interesting, but at the same time "could not be solved with one request." Currently, Maxim also holds the position of a development intern at T-Bank.

"I probably liked the Reverse Engineering task the most. This is a discipline in which a person is given some kind of application, program or something else, to try to understand how it works, and, for example, enter the correct password if there is some kind of password verification," he said.

The same opinion was expressed by Alexey Novikov, the winner of the gold medal, a student of the 11th grade of the Moscow State Educational Educational Institution "School No. 1537 "Information Technologies".

"We always have assignments on some topics that you didn't know before, something you're not ready for, and you have to leave on the one hand. It's very interesting, and that's why I attend such events," said the winner.

And Mikhail Selin, a student of the 11th grade of the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE Lyceum) in Moscow, who received the bronze medal, remembered most of all the tasks for the public operation of web services. The participant is given a website on which certain actions must be performed in order to gain access to the server behind it. As Mikhail noted, such tasks were "super complicated", but at the same time quite interesting to complete.

Georgy Balashov, a student of the 11th grade of the Moscow State Educational Educational Institution "School in the Southeast named after Marshal V.I. Chuikov", noted the unusual process of preparing for the Olympiad. The Russian national team was initially composed of experienced CTF competition format players. According to him, the training sessions took several months in total and began with online classes, which the students attended almost every day.

In total, the Russian national team won eight medals — three gold, three silver and two bronze.

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On June 26, the Russian national team won eight medals and took second place at the International Cybersecurity Olympiad. In the final, the Russian team met with 128 schoolchildren from 25 countries. High school students solved problems of increased complexity in cryptography, binary vulnerabilities, web vulnerabilities and reverse engineering, as well as in pentest, steganography and forensics.