Ubaid Mustafa Qadari, Executive Director of Emerging Tech Risk and Cyber Practice of KPMG Malaysia presenting the Champions Award to team _SKR.

Congratulations team _SKR!

Cyber Security Challenge participants together with KPMG top management.

Cyber Security Challenge participants together with KPMG top management.

By Faresa Azmi

The growing need for IT security professionals is widely acknowledged worldwide. To help mitigate this shortage of skills, many countries launched national cyber security competitions targeting towards students, university graduates or even non-ICT professionals with a clear aim to find new and young cyber talents and encourage young people to pursue a career in cyber security.

The KPMG Cyber Challenge is an annual live cyber security competition that allows student teams to solve challenges and capture flags (CTF).The competition comprised of two separate challenges: Cyber Security Challenge and Cyber Technology Challenge, which was participated by over 300 undergraduates from 21 universities and colleges.

School of Computing and Creative Media (SCCM) teams achieved tremendously, at the recently concluded competition. The KPMG Cyber Security Challenge 2019 was held on 25th September 2019 at One World Hotel, Bandar Utama.

The team_SKR was comprised of Chin Hong Wei and Low Wei Hou (Bachelor of Computer Science students) and Tan Wei Jin and Tan Chung Shen (Bachelor of Software Engineering students). They won the prizes and walked away with a cash prize of RM3, 000 in prize money, and 2 trophies: Champions and Top University for their excellent effort. The team was mentored by SCCM lecturer, namely Mr Khoo Li Jing.

“Congrats to the students. It is a great achievement that they emerge to champion. They encountered many failures before the sweetness of success by participating numerous of challenges. Now they became a role model for the junior year students.I am happy with their participation in this challenge”, explained Mr Khoo.

After seven hours of passionate  in doing their testing and innovative thinking together with analytical skills, team_SKR being a champion in Cyber Security Challenge together with Top University Award.
“We didn’t assume to win both the Cyber Security Challenge and Top University Award. We are amazed and very blissful as we were able to learn a lot of technical skills throughout this struggle. We also acknowledged areas we can improve on, which can be applied in our future work; we’re excited to pursue this type of work as our career,” said Chin Hong Wei.

The KPMG Cyber Challenge 2019 was supported by strategic partners Netpoleon and the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), with FireEye on board as the challenge sponsor. KPMG also welcomed the Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) and Al-Rajhi Bank as Supporting Organisations.