The TeamRocketIst joined a year ago. The competitions are called Capture the Flag and “are focused on topics approached in class, but we don’ t always get the opportunity to put them in practice”, explains Ricardo Campos, the team’s spokesman. The willing to try and to learn more brought them together. The team is composed of Ricardo Campos, Luís Freixinho, João Ribeiro, Marcos Faria, Diogo Monteiro, Pedro Reganha, João Santos and André Faustino, all of them students of Information Systems and Computer Engineering at Taguspark. Although they started competing in August 2017 they were already selected for the CSAW FINAL 2017 to be held in Valence, France, as one of the 10 best European university students’ teams.

Cryptography, web, cyber security forensics and reverse engineering are some of the topics that these students need to deal with in order to overcome the several challenges. “The scores are proportional to challenge difficulty. Teams are ordered according to their scores so they know the final ranking”, clarifies Ricardo.

The European final will be held at École Nationale Supérieure D’ingénieurs des Systèmes Avancés et Réseaux (Esisar School), from 9th to 11th November in several places around the world. They will compete with 40 teams, some of them composed of experts with a lot of experience. Although being aware that “to win will be a difficult task” they affirm “we will try to represent Instituto Superior Técnico the best way we can”.