APU Students Championed the F-Secure IT Security Competition Malaysia 2016

Here’s another good news to share!

Team MD1337, comprising students from APU’s School of Computing & Technology (SCT), Ahmed Nabil Al-Eryani, Alexander Sukhamera and Marat Omaraliev, was announced as the champion of the F-Secure IT Security Competition Malaysia 2016. They were among the top ten semi-finalists who competed for the championship that was held at Bangsar South Nexus Mall on the 14th of April 2016. 

The competition was open to all full-time IT undergraduate students who are enrolled in Malaysian public and private universities. It was also a joint effort between F-Secure and the Malaysian Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) as part of their initiatives to transfer and empower high technology skills to the local labour force through education. As such, the competition had provided students with the platform to demonstrate their academic skills and express their interests in the IT security field.

This year’s championship revolved around the theme of “Protection against Advanced. Persistent. Threat (APT)”. Prior to their advancement into the grand finals that took place in the form of Jeopardy-style, the team excelled at the university-based qualifying test and the semi-finals, in which they were given IT security challenges in the forms of Multiple Choice Questions (MCQ) and Multistage Challenge. Participating students were required to be equipped with a wide range of knowledge in the IT Security field, such as news and current events related to cyber threats, security and targeted attacks, malware, forensics, programming, encryption, debugging, and more.

The team put in a lot of effort in preparing themselves for the competition the guidance of Yusnita Bt Yusof, Yogeswaran A/L Nathan and Sulaiman bin Harun. By demonstrating outstanding technical skills and excellent teamwork throughout the competition, their hard work paid off as they walked away with a MacBook Pro each, a 1-year license for F-Secure SAFE product, as well as a free Student Pass to the 19th Association of Anti-Virus Asia Researchers (AVAR) International Conference 2016, the largest Asia Pacific conference on anti-malware. 

Good job and thumbs up to the team and their mentors for making APU proud!