A team of four Bournemouth University (BU) students were semi-finalists and won the Best Teamwork prize at this year’s national Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge. The invitation-only challenge is designed to identify and foster the next generation of policy and strategy leaders for the cyber security challenges of the future.
The competition took place in the BT Tower in London over two days earlier in February with 17 teams from universities across the country taking part. The teams took on the role of senior advisors to government and industry dealing with a complex escalating cyber-attack with national and international ramifications across government and industry. Competitors first had to asses and understand the technical and strategic implications of the scenario, analyse the threats and risks, and then propose effective mitigating policies and strategies to panels of cyber security expert judges.
The team from BU consisted of Duncan Ki-Aries, a Cyber Security PhD student and Ashley Kenway, Flynn Ackworth and Oscar Needham, all BSc (Hons) Cyber Security Management students. The students received the prize for Best Teamwork – which included a cruise on a yacht - from Andy Bates, Executive Director of Global Cyber Alliance and former CTO at Verizon EMEA.
After the competition, Duncan said: “I couldn’t be more proud of our team for the way we responded to the Cyber 9/12 challenge - we really gave it our all. We were up against teams of a very high standard, including some that were made up of postdoctoral students, so to have been semi-finalists was a real honour – and of course we’re all delighted to have won the Best Teamwork Prize, as this was great recognition towards our strong collaborative approach.”
Edward Apeh, Principal Academic in Computing, said: “Team BU did Bournemouth University proud. Cyber 9/12 gave the students some great experience of dealing with cyber-attacks and provided them with a chance to network as well as measure their skills against the teams from other universities. To even be invited to take part in the competition was a big achievement, so to be semi-finalists and winners of the Best Teamwork prize is really amazing. Well done Team BU!”
