Asia-Pacific Cyber Champs

Students from Asia Pacific University (APU) championed EY’s Asia-Pacific Cyber Hackathon 2019

Kuala Lumpur, 26 March 2019: Four students from the Asia Pacific University of Technology & Innovation (APU) brought pride to their university and the country as they emerged as the Champion Team at the 2019 Ernst & Young (EY) Asia-Pacific Cyber Hackathon Challenge.

The Hackathon took place in Hong Kong. It was an international arena for top universities from across the Asia-Pacific to compete on strategic thinking, reasoning and technical programming skills. University teams from Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia were amongst the finalists.

All participating teams were required to work on a real-life cyber experience that challenges them to ‘capture the flags’ by completing various custom-made scenarios.

Team “FetchOrbis” from APU comprising Yap Chee Sing, Mun Chee Wah, Imran Esack Dawoodjee and Hassan Zayan Azzam from the School of Computing & Technology (SoCT) achieved the most points at the end of the challenge. They eventually championed the challenge and walked away with HKD20,000 (equivalent to RM10,380).

The students are part of the Cyber Security and Software Engineering programmes at APU. This is their first time participating in the EY Asia-Pacific Cyber Hackathon Challenge.

“This has been an incredible learning experience for us as we are still very new to the competitive scene. The competition emulated real world environments and scenarios really well and it certainly was challenging,” expressed Hassan Zayan Azzam, member of team “FetchOrbis”, as he recalled the memorable experience.

“Congratulations Team FetchOrbis! They made us proud by demonstrating not only knowledge and skills in cyber security but also the necessary passion, dedication, team-spirit, problem-solving skills and emotional intelligence to be able to withstand the demands and pressure which comes in any hackathon,” expressed Surpriya Singh, Head of School of Technology, APU.