Winner Crowned in “Hacker Games” Contest Promoting Secure Coding Skills

The University of Warwick has been crowned as the winner of Veracode’s inaugural Hacker Games competition.

After coming out on top in a collegiate contest between eight universities from across the UK and US, the WMG Cyber Security Center at the University of Warwick was awarded a $10,000 charitable donation. Tufts University came in second place, earning a $5000 donation. Additionally, prize money was given to each individual player from the winning teams and overall top scorers.

During the event, announced earlier this month, a total of nearly 90 computer science and cybersecurity students undertook a series of hands-on coding challenges over a two-week period (March 15-25). Held in Veracode’s Security Labs to gamify the experience, the participants successfully solved a total of 8500 labs and accumulated nearly 100,000 points.

The initiative, which is supported by the UK government, aims to help close the cybersecurity skills gap by encouraging the development of secure coding skills among the younger generation.

Chris Wysopal, founder and chief technology officer at Veracode, commented: “The cybersecurity skills gap is proving costly to corporations worldwide. The Hacker Games are a way for us to demonstrate the importance of secure coding to the next generation of software developers. The passion, competitive spirit and commitment from each participating university was impressive and we’re excited to work with each of these schools to make software security a more regular part of their curriculum.”

Professor Tim Watson, director of the WMG Cyber Security Center at the University of Warwick, said: “The Hacker Games were a fantastic way to promote secure software development and provided our students with a highly challenging experience. The labs are tremendous resources and we will be encouraging our students to take advantage of them to further their skills and experience. We are very grateful to Veracode for creating such a wonderful environment and competition.”