Countdown to the Reply Cyber Security Challenge 2021

September 28th, 2021

On the 15th of October 2021, Reply will launch the fourth edition of the Reply Cyber Security Challenge, a team-based coding competition open to young professionals and cyber security enthusiasts from all over the world.

This year’s edition will be supported by Intesa Sanpaolo, one of the top banking groups in Europe, and Immersive Labs, the platform empowering businesses to increase, measure and evidence human capability in every part of their cybersecurity.

Intesa Sanpaolo‘s support confirms its commitment to increase education, awareness and training on cybersecurity among young people. Improving cybersecurity knowledge, skills and judgement is Immersive Labs’ mission and the Reply Cyber Security Challenge represents a new and engaging way to power up people’s cyber capabilities.

The challenge, which in 2020 welcomed more than 10,000 participants from 160 countries gather together in 2,380 teams, aims to put teams (from 2 to 4 players) in competition in a 24-hour marathon, Capture The Flag (CTF) challenge, focusing on the identification of vulnerabilities purposely hidden within software and computer systems.

Developed by Reply's Cyber Security experts, the challenge is comprised of five gaming categories (Coding, Web, Binary, Crypto and Miscellaneous) in which participants will have to try to solve, in the shortest time possible, security problems and riddles of increasing difficulty.

The competition will be held on Friday, October 15, during the European Cyber Security Month (ECSM), the European awareness campaign that every year, in October, aims to raise the awareness of citizens, organizations, companies and institutions about the major cyber risks.

The podium will be composed by the top three teams that, at the end of the competition, achieve the highest score and present a report showing the strategies they adopted during the challenge. The final score will be determined by the highest number of hidden flags identified plus a bonus awarded for the quick resolution of the problems.

From today and until October 15th, at the website challenges.reply.com, participants will have the opportunity to register for the challenge for free (by registering their team or joining other players in random teams) and to train in "sandbox" mode on the challenges of previous editions.

The Reply Cyber Security Challenge is also enriched with the Train&Win program. Starting today, teachers and students of more than 16 years will be able to train together with problems to solve in CTF mode on the challenges.reply.com platform and win Reply gadgets for educational purposes. The platform becomes a cyber security gym, with exercises and study materials made available to help prepare for the international competition on October 15th.

The Cyber Security Challenge is part of Reply’s Challenges programme, which aims to target the most innovative trends in coding creativity, cyber security and finance. Since 2018, more than 100,000 people have joined the Reply Challenges community.