European Cyber Security Challenge 2019: Romanians, the best in Europe

By Edwig Ban
Romania won the European champion title at the European Cyber Security Challenge 2019 competition, which took place on October 9-11, at the Parliament Palace in Bucharest.
On the podium of the competition, Romania was followed by Italy and Austria. The standings continued with: Germany, Great Britain, Poland, France, Estonia, Denmark, Portugal, Czech Republic, Greece, Spain, Norway, Ireland, Holland, Switzerland, Cyprus, Liechtenstein and Luxembourg.
The ranking on the first place in the European hierarchy of cyber security experts represents a first for the Romanian team, after, at two of the previous editions of the competition (2016 – in Germany, in Dusseldorf, and 2017, in Spain, in Malaga), our national. ranked second.
The competition included three levels of difficulty of the tests: hard, medium and easy. The tests covered areas such as: web security, cryptography, reverse engineering and investigations, programming, attack and defense, Linux / Windows / macOS security, and mobile phone security.
The competitors from 20 countries participated in the 2019 edition of the European Cyber Security Challenge (ECSC), Romania being present with a team of 10 young people.
On the list of countries that lined up at the start of the competition in Bucharest were: Austria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Switzerland, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Holland, Norway, Poland , Romania, Spain, Portugal and the United Kingdom. At the same time, two countries – Finland and Malta – were present as observers of the competition.
European Cyber Security Challange (ECSC) is an initiative of the European Union Agency for Network Internet Security (ENISA) and is part of the Action Plan for the Implementation of the European Union Cyber Security Strategy (EU). .
The event in Bucharest was organized by the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI), the National Cyber Security Incident Response Center (CERT-RO) and the National Association for Information Systems Security (ANSSI), in partnership with Orange, Bit Sentinel, certSIGN , Cisco, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, eMag, Clico and Cybertas.
According to ENISA data, next year’s European cyber security competition will be held in Vienna. At the same time, the ECSC calendar also includes the organization of the competition in Prague – in 2021, Norway (2022) and Italy (2023).