INTEC headquarters of the international cybernetic competition Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge for Latin America!
SANTO DOMINGO- The Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo (INTEC) hosted for the first time in the country the Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge, a cyber competition designed to give students from all academic disciplines an understanding of the policy and strategy challenges associated with crisis management in the face of a larger scale cyber attack event.
The event held for the first time in Latin America and the Caribbean is organized by the Atlantic Council and United States Department of State, In collaboration with Cyber4Dev, EU CyberNet/LAC4, INTEC y MITER Corporation. It is the world's only cyber strategy and policy competition in which more than 5000 students have been trained since its establishment in Washington, DC in 2012.
The activity, carried out for the first time in a bilingual format, was designed to train university students, enrolled in post-secondary academic institutions in Latin America and the Caribbean, on cyber crisis management and response planning. Divided into teams of 3-4 participants per country, participants learned how to respond to a scenario that examines a cyber crisis with far-reaching impacts on national security, public policy, diplomacy, and more.
The opening ceremony was welcomed by Kacie Yearout, Cyber Policy Advisor, Office of Cyber and Digital Policy, US Department of State, who welcomed the participants and explained the dynamics of the competition. He was also directing the event Safa Shahwan Edwards, deputy director of the Atlantic Council's cyber policy initiative.
El Dean of the Engineering Area Cayetano Rodríguez He also received those present and encouraged good performance in the competition, as well as taking advantage of the connections they can make in the activity. "For us it is an honor to have them here, especially in an activity as important as cybersecurity," said Rodríguez, who attended accompanied by Lorenzo Martínez, coordinator of Cybersecurity Engineering at INTEC.
The teams were evaluated by a panel of international expert judges drawn from government, industry, academia and civil society, based on the quality of their proposed policies, their decision-making processes and their oral presentation.
Through this process, they worked with trainers from their respective institutions to develop their policy skills, and feedback from expert judges supported all participants the opportunity to improve their skills in policy analysis, effective communication, and helped them create networking scenarios during the competition.
The participating countries in this edition were Panama, Brazil, Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Chile and the Dominican Republic. In this competition, The three teams with the highest accumulated score were HackHunters from the National Polytechnic School of Ecuador, PanGBT-4 from #Panama and the representative team from Brazil.
Students participating in Cyber 9/12 have the opportunity to interact with senior cyber expert mentors and professionals while developing skills in policy analysis and presentation, as well as the chance to win complimentary passes to a regional cyber conference. Black Hat valued at more than two thousand dollars, thanks to the partners in their cybersecurity events.
To date, the competition has involved more than a thousand students from universities in the United States, Europe, the Indo-Pacific, Africa, and the Middle East. Through its crisis scenario format, mentoring, recruiting and networking opportunities, the Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge has expanded its global reach with regional competitions in the United States, as well as London, Dundee, Geneva, Paris and Cape Town, in order to foster a global community of multidisciplinary cybersecurity professionals.
About the Atlantic Council
Driven by the mission to "shape the global future together," the Atlantic Council is a nonpartisan organization that advances the leadership and engagement of the United States in the world, in partnership with allies and partners, to shape solutions to global challenges.