Team of EY Professionals Wins the Operational Technology Cyber Challenge

EY has announced today that a team of EY professionals has won the Capture the Flag Operational Technology (OT) challenge in the prestigious Global Cyber Challenge conducted by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Center (NCIIPC). The three-member team comprising Tanoy Bose, Vignesh Durairaj and Vijay Kumar, successfully hacked into a simulated smart city. The trio for their distinguished feat were felicitated by the Hon’ble Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi.

The team (titled ‘Bitvijays’) of EY professionals had five hours to identify various systems of a simulated smart city and hack a metro line to gain control of a driverless metro. The final challenge was a faceoff between the top two teams for hacking an open source electronic health system.

Burgess S Cooper, Partner - Cybersecurity, EY India, said “Our team of EY professionals has made EY India very proud at such an esteemed national platform, for which I would like to extend my heartiest wishes to Tanoy, Vignesh and Vijay. Their win is also a reinforcement of our commitment to encourage personal upskilling and professional enhancement, thus, addressing cybersecurity risks, vulnerabilities and needs of businesses.”

The participants/teams were presented puzzles, programs with security vulnerabilities or systems to break into. Embedded in the puzzles, programs or systems were “secret keys” or “flags.” CTF was divided into two categories, namely, IT and OT. Capture the Flag (OT) was a cybersecurity competition featuring a non-hardened simulated industrial system (ICS) with planted vulnerabilities. The participants had to exploit these vulnerabilities to solve the different challenges provided.

Burgess S Cooper added,“EY with its own series of hackathons in niche areas of technology remains committed to creating and providing different collaborative platforms that encourage innovation and address complex business problems. We will continue to bring together diverse talent communities in the cybersecurity space to enhance their skills in this domain, and thereby, we remain committed to our purpose for building a better working world.”

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