Student team from ASIA PACIFIC UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION (APU) champions F-Secure IT Security Competition 2016

Kuala Lumpur, 14 April 2016: Team MD1337 from the Asia Pacific University of Technology & Innovation (APU) was announced as the champion of the F-Secure IT Security Competition Malaysia 2016.

The team comprised students from APU’s School of Computing and Technology (SCT), Ahmed Nabil Al-Eryani, Alexander Sukhamera and Marat Omaraliev under the guidance of Yusnita Bt Yusof, Yogeswaran A/L Nathan and Sulaiman bin Harun. They were among the top ten semi-finalists who competed for the championship that was held at Bangsar South Nexus Mall on the 14^th of April 2016.

The students 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 19^th Association of Anti-Virus Asia Researchers (AVAR) International Conference 2016, the largest Asia Pacific conference on anti-malware.

The team put in a lot of effort in preparing themselves for the competition. Ahmed Nabil, Year 2 Software Engineering student, narrated, “We practiced our skills and knowledge a lot for this competition, hence we have gained a lot in terms of experience and this will definitely help us in securing good career opportunities in the future. Preparation is the key to our success, and we are glad that our hard work paid off.” On the other hand, Marat Omaraliev, who is undertaking his Diploma in ICT, expressed his gratitude towards the team’s mentors for their dedication and effort, “I feel very thankful towards our mentors and the university for giving us their opportunity to participate in this competition.”

“I am proud of the team as they demonstrated outstanding skills throughout the competition. Looking forward to seeing them keep up the good work in their future studies and career too,” said Yusnita bt Yusof, mentor of the team.

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 “Protecting the World against APT (Advanced. Persistent. Threat)”. 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.