NU CS & CE Students Place in Top 9% of 'Hack The Vote' National Cybersecurity Competition

25 undergraduate and masters CS & CE students participated in Hack The Vote, placing in the top 9th percentile of the nearly 2000 teams participating in the "capture the flag" cybersecurity competition, held Friday, November 4, 2016. At the conclusion of the event, team 'NUSec' placed 105th out of 1947 registered teams.

EECS undergraduate student Wayne Xun (CS 17'), who helped Prof. Yan Chen organize the event, remarked of the increased interest and visibility of security as a rising research discipline, "It's definitely a growing field, and all of the students that participated in the event had a lot of fun." View more event photos

Notable problem solvers of merit, include:

• Trump Likes Colors (Forensics, 250 points): David Samuels (CE 18')
• Warp Speed (Forensics, 150 points): Michael Gallagher (Feinberg)
• Sander's Fan Club (Web, 100 points): Sebastian Perez (CS 17')
• Consul (Reverse Engineering, 100 points): David Samuels
• TOPKEK (Crytography, 50 points): Sebastian Perez and Daniel Stein (CS 18')
• Sanity (Vote, 1 point): Everyone

Interested in learning more about the growing field of security? There is a security related course offered during Winter Quarter, titled, "EECS 395, 495: Digital Forensics and Incident Response" taught by Prof. Chen & Jibran Ilyas. Digital Forensics is the field of responding to and investigating breached systems, thus the immediacy of recent political events make this a great opportunity to learn the behind the scenes of high profile compromises such as Hillary Clinton's leaked emails.

In addition, if students are interested, there are several security related research projects under Prof. Chen (ychen@northwestern.edu) that are available for students to contribute to for credit.