Kaspersky announces winners of its annual Secur’IT Cup student competition

Kaspersky has announced the winners of its international competition for students – Secur’IT Cup 2019. A team of students from the Russian National Research Nuclear University MEPhI was named at the final event, which took place at the Kaspersky Academy Partner’s Summit in Lisbon. A team from the Singapore Institute of Technology and Marius Benthin from the University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt also received prizes.

Secur’IT Cup is Kaspersky’s global competition that unites ambitious students from all over the world to work on fresh cybersecurity ideas, with the aim of helping to create a safer future. Participants have the chance to win $10,000 and benefit from competing alongside like-minded students to build an understanding of what it is like to work in the industry. This year students and young researchers with different academic backgrounds showcased their projects aimed at solving existing cybersecurity issues affecting the three most significant industries of the future: finance, automotive and machine learning. This included software and hardware solution prototypes, pieces of code, and a research-based policy, among others.

The final round of the competition took place at Kaspersky Academy Partner’s Summit, held in Lisbon, Portugal. Overall, 27 participants from Bahrain, Bangladesh, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, India, Iran, Russian Federation, Singapore, Spain and Ukraine were named finalists, and 24 of them presented their projects to a jury consisting of Kaspersky and industry experts. 

The Sploit00n team, from the National Research Nuclear University MEPhI, won first place in the competition with their project “Malwario”, which is dedicated to an advanced AI-based system responsible for unknown malicious software detection with hardware acceleration.

Commenting on the win, Eugene Antipin said: “Our team is very happy to have taken part in such a cool event. A lot of teams had good projects and presentations. And on my opinion, such events are an excellent opportunity for young researchers to present their ideas to the jury, listen for critique and improve their projects! Also, I'd like to mention that Lisbon is a beautiful city, organization of the event was excellent and it was an honor for me to be on stage. Thanks everyone.”

Steven Furnell, Associate Dean and Professor of IT Security, the University of Plymouth and a member of the jury, added: “The presentations from the finalists were of an extremely high quality. They showed us a range of innovative ideas, with real potential to protect systems and combat future threats. I was impressed with both their technical achievements and the professional standard to which they implemented and explained their work. I am certain that many of them will have a great future in the field of cybersecurity, and I look forward to seeing how their projects move forward.”

Denis Barinov, Head of Kaspersky.Academy commented: “Secur’IT Cup is one of the Academy’s most significant projects, which allows us to bring together young talents in the cybersecurity field from all around the world to learn, network and compete with each other. We believe that such competitions are a source of innovation and that global collaborations are what will ultimately help us to make the world a safer place.”

Two runners up were also recognized at the event. PengFei Yu and his team N0H4Ts from the Singapore Institute of Technology with an “Automated Android Mobile Application Obfuscator” project won second prize and will attend the Kaspersky Security Analysts’ Summit 2020 in Barcelona, April 6-9, with all travel expenses paid. The third placed project, by Marius Benthin from the University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt, was “Classifying malicious Binaries using Code Stylometry”, and he has received sponsorship to participate in a cybersecurity conference in Europe.

The Kaspersky Academy Partner’s Summit this year welcomed almost 50 academic partners from universities around the world, to hear the latest updates from Kaspersky about the business and the threat landscape, as well as the initiatives that universities and students can benefit from.