STM – Capture the Flag 2017 Gathered White-Hat Hackers
The “Capture the Flag” contest, held on 26 October 2017 boasted an impressive number of invitees who came to Ankara this year with 29 teams and a total of 113 contestants.
Making a speech at the opening ceremony of the competition, STM General Manager Mr. Davut Yılmaz discussed STM’s approach to cyber and information security protection of the country and the investments they made and said: “We are serving many critical public institutions in Turkey as well as the private sector with our Cyber Fusion Center where we eliminate the danger before it occurs, in other words before the cyber-attack takes place. We also issue a cyber security threat report every 3 months to raise cyber security awareness. With this report, we aim to draw attention to the potential threats in our country. Naturally, we must invest in R&D and human resources to realize all of these proactive measures. While we develop national software on one hand, we try to increase our human resources and strengthen our current structure on the other hand. It is not easy to train a cyber security specialist, especially to create a trained human resource. As STM, we excluded the “bachelor degree” requirement in the recruitment process, only in the area of cyber security. We do not require a bachelor degree from candidates who have proven themselves in this area.”
The winner of the contest was Team RTFM
In the competition, which lasted approximately seven hours, the contestants found system vulnerabilities that were deliberately placed in the competition environment, specially created by STM’s cyber security team. In the competition where cyber security experts had the opportunity to improve themselves, the participants were engaged in the challenges to reach specific targets set in areas such as cryptology, reverse engineering and Wi-Fi.
The first prize in the contest was 15,000 TL, the second prize was 10,000 TL and the third prize was 7,000 TL. The first prize winner was RTFM, the second was Kuzgunlar and the third was Hackedemedikmi.
