Most European countries have a strong demand for IT security professionals. These specialists are very rare. We need cyber talents to protect the critical IT infrastructures from hackers and cyber criminals. Many European countries are therefore setting up national cyber security competitions for finding young cyber talents, encouraging them to pursue a career in cyber security.
The European Cyber Security Challenge leverages these competitions in that it adds a pan-European layer to them: The top cyber talents from each country come together and meet, network and collaborate. Finally they compete against each other to determine the winner of the ECSC. To find out who’s countries team is the best, contestants have to solve security related tasks from domains such as web security, mobile security, crypto puzzles, reverse engineering and forensics and collect points for solving them.
Website of the competition http://www.europeancybersecuritychallenge.eu/
REPORT published by ENISA with guidelines for organizing a pan-European challenge in 2015 and the status of existing competitions in Europe.