In recent days, a representation of six officers attending the Transmission Corps and the Corps of Engineers of the Command for Training and Application School of the Army participated, online, in the national final competition of the CyberChallenge.IT 2021, Italian training program for young IT security talents, organized by National Cybersecurity Laboratory del Cini (National Interuniversity Consortium for Informatics).
Now in its fifth edition, the competition was the final event of the training and development course of specialized skills related to the world of cybersecurity which involved about 4900 participants, between 16 and 23 years old, belonging to the teams of each of the 33 offices that have joined the project (30 universities, the Tuscan Cybersecurity Competence Center, the Training Command and Application School of the Turin Army and the Air Force Academy of Pozzuoli).
The young experts of the major Italian universities, who most distinguished themselves for their specific skills, gave life to a complex Capture the Flag (CTF) type race, a sort of virtual "flag stealer", in which each team was called to attack adversaries' IT infrastructures, while protecting their own, and preventing others from taking control.
The officers of the Army Application School performed well in a very demanding competition that required extensive skills and a heterogeneous team by training, capable of exercising offensive and defensive techniques in the fields of encryption, server management and source code analysis.
In particular, Lieutenant Cecilia Ruggiero of the 196 ° course "Certezza" of the Corps of Engineers and the second lieutenant Teresa Torresani of the 199 ° course "Dare" Corpo Ingegneri have particularly distinguished themselves as among the top 5 best-ranked women at national level and were awarded as "Digital Ambassadors".
The increasingly widespread use of new technologies, the digitization of all processes, the establishment of real information assets has highlighted the importance of cybersecurity, which is today increasingly crucial to guarantee the protection of networks, computers, programs. and data from possible attacks or unauthorized access.
