Talented young people are expected at the National Cyber Security Championship

The National Cyber Security Championship - RoCSC2024, the fifth edition, will start this year with the selection stage, scheduled for March 8-10, after which the final of the competition will be organized, between May 22 and 25, according to the National Directorate of Cyber Security (DNSC). The competition is organized by DNSC, together with the Romanian Intelligence Service (through the National Cyberint Center) and the National Association for the Security of Computer Systems (ANSSI), as well as with important support from partners and sponsors from the private sector. According to the DNSC, the Romanian Cyber Security Challenge (RoCSC) is an annual Capture The Flag (CTF) type event, which aims to identify talented young people in cybersecurity, lay the foundations of a community of cyber enthusiasts and actively contribute to the training process of experts, in the context of an increasingly acute need on the labor market for specialists in the field. In this context, the competition also has the role of selecting the eligible members for the Romanian team that will participate in the European Championship. The registration process for ROCSC24 is already active, so eligible young people (under the age of 25) can register for the competition on the rocsc.ro website, until March 7, 2024, and interested young people can start on one among the qualification paths to the preliminary batch of the cyber security representative. The first stage of selection (exclusively online) will take place between March 8 and 10, 2024, and the final will take place physically, in Bucharest, between May 22 and 25, 2024. According to the DNSC: "For the curious who want to participate and tests the skill in the field in a competitive setting, but does not fall into the age category required to be selected for the national team, there is also the possibility to compete outside the competition in the Open category. After the ROCSC24 final, the organizers will select the preliminary batch of Team Romania that will go, for a few days during the summer, to a specialized bootcamp. During the bootcamp, young people will be tested and trained through exercises in the field of web application security, cyber attack and defense, cryptography , network traffic analysis, reverse engineering, etc.".

Since 2015, this public-private initiative has supported young cyber talents and organized selection activities, training and participation of the Romanian national team at the European Cyber Security Challenge (ECSC), a competition of extremely contested cyber at the European level. In the eight years of participation in the ECSC, Team Romania won the 2019 edition and was twice European vice-champion. This year's edition of the European competition will be hosted in Italy, in Turin, and will take place between October 8 and 11. Each member state of the European Union (EU) or state invited to participate in the ECSC can present a national team consisting of ten players, of which five juniors (14-20 years), five seniors (21-25 years) and two reserves .

The European Cyber Security Challenge 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 Cyber Security Strategy of the European Union (EU).