Tag: UWEcyber

Transatlantic cyber contest sees success for UWE Falcons students

Author Anna Jones | Posted on

ROWE CTF 11th May 2024:

The inaugural Rowan University and UWE Bristol (ROWE) Catch the Flag (CTF) saw students from both UWE Bristol and Rowan University, Delaware, New Jersey partake in a series of CTF challenges. From exploiting vulnerable service, solving cryptographic conundrums, analysing pcaps, digital forensics images to an open-source intelligence challenge where students were tasked with finding out as much information as they could from a single image.

UWE Bristol have established a strong collaborative partnership with Rowan University. Professor Fred Stinchcombe is Head of Cyber Security at Rowan University and UWE Bristol alumni from the 1990’s, who has worked with Professor Phil Legg and student representative Ian Caple to develop collaborative programme of events, and a shared online Discord community.

To this end UWE Bristol CTF Falcons challenged their counterparts on the other side of the pond to a CTF, designed by UWE’s technical team on this occasion (Alan Mills, Jon White and Ian Caple).

The event saw students beavering away tackling what was a considerable array of challenges in a race to capture as many flags as possible. UWE CTF Falcons student Mohamed Almarri (MSc Cyber Security) was successful in capturing the most number of flags on this occasion.

We look forward to many more international challenges with the students at Rowan University, as well as other universities throughout the UK.

UWE Bristol Capture The Flag Falcons take flight

Author Anna Jones | Posted on

By Ian Caple, MSc Cyber Security student (September 2023 cohort)

Saturday 24th of Febuary saw the birth of a new student-led cyber security initiative, UWE Bristol Capture The Flag Falcons (CTF). Students from across the school of computer science came together to take part in a CTF competition. Undergrads and Postgrads alike took part in a series of cyber security related challenges from Web exploration, cryptography, digital forensic challenges such as hacking veracrypt containers.

In teams of 2 or 3, students battled their way through a series of challenges, hacking their way in ir exploiting vulnerabilities to gain access to areas they shouldn’t be to find the flags.

17 students in all took part giving UWE CTF Falcons a great starting point for the future of the Falcons. After 8 eventful hours that saw every team overcome multiple challenges the CTF challenge was won by The Phishermen – 3rd year BSc Cyber Security and Digital Forensics students Harvey Keane, Callum Duncan and Ash Floyd, who captured a staggering 13 of 15 flags.

But the real winners was everyone who took part and can say they were they when UWE CTF Falcons took flight.

A huge thank you and honourable mention needs to go to our teaching staff Alan Mills and Jon White for helping us set up the challenges and making the day as much fun as it was!

UWEcyber students and CyberWomen@UWE support Cynam EmPowerCyber to inspire 1000 year 8 schoolgirls

Author Anna Jones | Posted on

The recent “EmpowerCyber 2023” cyber outreach event, hosted by Cynam in Gloucester was attended by 1000 Year 8 schoolgirls from across the region and supported by 30 different industry partners.

The event aims to ignite curiosity and empower young girls to explore the incredible opportunities in the world of cyber security, opportunities they may not have otherwise considered. This works towards addressing the UK’s digital skills gap and striving for better female representation in the cyber workforce.

The UWECyber team, supported by our BSc Cyber Security and Digital Forensics, and MSc Cyber Security students, hosted a “Future Funfair” event. The event uses Lego-based funfair rides to where simulated attacks on cyber physical systems can be investigated and mitigated against by the students. These scenarios bring to life the importance of cybersecurity in everyday technology, from safeguarding personal data to protecting national infrastructure.

The CyberWomen@UWE

Additionally the CyberWomen@UWE group provided a cryptography-based murder mystery event. This challenging and exciting activity immersed the girls in the world of digital sleuthing, decrypting messages, and solving cyber puzzles. It was a powerful demonstration of how cyber skills can be applied in creative and critical thinking scenarios.

The involvement of 30 different industry partners was instrumental in the success of EmpowerCyber 2023. Their contributions offered valuable insights into the real-world applications of cyber and STEM skills, showcasing a wide array of career possibilities in these fields. This industry collaboration also highlighted the growing need for skilled professionals in the cybersecurity sector.

The UWE Cyber team
Supporting the students

Through initiatives like EmpowerCyber 2023, cyber outreach activities play critical role in reducing the gender gap in STEM and cyber fields. By capturing the interest of young girls at a crucial stage in their education, this event has laid the groundwork for nurturing a generation of empowered, cyber-aware women ready to take on the challenges of tomorrow’s tech landscape.

South West Cyber Resilience Centre launch our new academic year of UWEcyber guest seminars

Author Anna Jones | Posted on

This week saw the launch of our UWEcyber guest seminar series for the new academic year. Each week we invite guests from industry, government and academia to talk with our students about the latest developments in the cyber security landscape.

This week, we welcomed Mark Moore from the South West Cyber Resilience Centre (SWCRC), a initiative set up to bring policing and academia together to support regional SMEs to upskill in cyber security.

SWCRC provides a fantastic opportunity for our students to be part of a network beyond the University, to work with students from across the UK, and to help SMEs that may not necessarily be tech savvy improve their posture against cyber attacks.

The SWCRC provides paid opportunities for occasional work, that would compliment at UWE Bristol. We have seen UWE Bristol students be successful in applying for this scheme in previous years, and we are keen to ensure that this success continues. For more details, please visit: South West Cyber Resilience Centre SWCRC

Research success working with the UK Defence Sector to defend our cyber space

Author Anna Jones | Posted on

For the UK Defence Sector, there is an ever-growing need to defend in our cyber space as well as the traditional domains of land, air, space and sea. Understanding the complexities of monitoring cyber space to ensure that an operational mission is a challenging task, that involves collating indicators of compromise and other related sources of information and applying data science skills to aggregate and reason about incoming observations. A team of UWE researchers, led by Professor Phil Legg, are working with Bristol-based TRIMETIS to develop innovation in this domain, and together the team have recently secured £200,000 funding from the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) to support two new research projects that address these problems.

The first project seeks to understand the human-machine teaming aspects of how analysts can interrogate and reason about data observations to inform cyber defence. Furthermore, by developing improved human-machine teaming efforts, underpinning by machine learning techniques, will enable improved decision-making in response to cyber threats, and an improved synergy between how machine learning can help to reason about data and improve a human analyst’s workflow, whilst also developing a model to understand how a human analyst will reason about data, such that this can improve the system interaction further. 

The second project seeks to understand how humans can better serve as sensors about the environment to protect and defend against threats. This involves improved reporting mechanisms of threats, both online and offline, and how this information can be integrated within larger data analytics and reasoning platforms about a given mission. The project will seek to understand the barriers of reporting, and how technology can enable better data collection from observers, such that this information can then be better utilised within human-machine based analysis.

The two projects will both launch in January 2023 and will run for 9 months. The resulting outputs will be shared with the defence communities and through wider academic dissemination. This recent set of projects complement the portfolio of work that UWEcyber has conducted with DSTL and the defence community over a number of years, with previous DSTL-funded UWE projects including ARCD (2022), HASTE (2018), and RicherPicture (2015, 2017).

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