TexSAW 2023 Virtually Hosts its 12th Annual Texas Security Awareness Week
Earlier this month, the UT Dallas Cyber Security Research and Education Institute (CSI), in conjunction with the UT Dallas Computer Science Department, virtually conducted its 12th Annual Texas Security Awareness Week (TexSAW 2023). Each year, TexSAW has brought together cybersecurity, computer science, and software engineering students from across Texas who are interested in pursuing careers in computer security and expanding their knowledge in cybersecurity. The event provides students with the opportunity to socialize and network with students from other universities in Texas who share a common interest in cybersecurity. Because the contest was virtual this year, participation was registered and advertised on ctftime.org and gained not only nationwide but also worldwide attention.
TexSAW 2023 consisted of a free 48-hour online capture-the-flag (CTF) competition. The competition is geared toward beginners in cybersecurity. Student teams consisting of up to four members were able to participate virtually in the contest at their own location. TexSAW 2023 saw almost 250 active participants on 32 teams from seven high schools and 25 universities from 12 countries. The main topics for the competition focused on web security, penetration testing, forensics, crypto, and other various security-related topics.
Participants were able to engage virtually with each other through a discord server that was created for the event. Participants asked each other questions and chatted about the challenges without revealing any of the solutions. This Jeopardy-style contest allowed students 48 hours to work on the competition challenges, which included several questions with varying difficulty levels.
Below are the winners of the 2023 TexSaw CTF competition whose team members were awarded with TryHackMe subscriptions:
1st Team Rubi di Cubrik – Italian High Schools
2nd Team Neubee – Northeastern University
3rd Team team__underscore_ – University of Maryland
4th Team Charliott – The University of Texas at Dallas
The 12th Annual TexSAW event was organized mainly by students of the Scholarship for Service (SFS) program, with the assistance of SFS program director Dr. Kamil Sarac.
ABOUT THE UT DALLAS COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT
The UT Dallas Computer Science program is one of the largest Computer Science departments in the United States with over 4,000 bachelors-degree students, more than 1,010 master’s students, 140 Ph.D. students, 52 tenure-track faculty members, and 42 full-time senior lecturers, as of Fall 2022. With the University of Texas at Dallas’ unique history of starting as a graduate institution first, the CS Department is built on a legacy of valuing innovative research and providing advanced training for software engineers and computer scientists.