Our students dominated the Cyber Heroes Academy finals

On April 25 in Bratislava, students from Slovakia and the Czech Republic competed in the finals of realistic cyberattack and defense simulations. And they were the best. Selected students from the regional rounds advanced to the final round of the CyberHeroes Academy. Thanks to the initiative of the Security@FIT research group and specifically Assoc. Prof. Kamil Malinka, the event took place last November at FIT; we reported on it here. In total, more than 400 competitors participated in the CyberHeroes Academy.

Among the top three finalists are two students from the Faculty of Information Technology: Jakub Kapitulčín and Radovan Psotný. “Cyber Heroes Academy opened the door for me to the world of SOC (Security Operations Center, ed.), which I had previously known only in theory. I really enjoyed working with real infrastructure, seeing attacks directly in the logs and on devices, and working with the team under time pressure to figure out what was happening and how to respond,” says Jakub Kapitulčín, reflecting on his successful run in the finals, which he says he thoroughly enjoyed, from the local round all the way to the conclusion in Bratislava. In the finals, he found himself in the new role of team leader. In addition to analyzing suspicious events, he sorted through a large number of alerts, grouped them into specific incidents, added further findings, distributed tasks among team members, and helped them when they got stuck, so to speak. Similarly, Radovan Psotný was glad for the new opportunity the competition gave him: “Cyber Heroes Academy tested my communication skills within the team, my knowledge of the cybersecurity world, and also helped me realize just how important and promising this industry really is.”

As an event targeting (not only) university students, the CyberHeroes Academy is a specific response to the shortage of cybersecurity experts. The demand for these experts is growing hand in hand with the increasing number of attacks on companies, public institutions, and critical infrastructure. The main goal of the project is to offer students real-world experience with cyber defense and attacks in a safe, simulated environment. And as it seems, according to the two successful finalists from FIT VUT, the event achieved its purpose.