Students! Graduates! Win £10,000 with the Cyber 10K challenge

Competition In a bid to help address the cyber skills gap in the UK, NCC Group is calling on Britain’s students and graduates to solve the cyber security challenges both businesses and consumers face today. The winner of the Cyber 10K challenge will receive £10,000 and expert advice from the company to develop their own security solution.

Enter and find out more here.

The underlying idea of this competition is to encourage students and recent grads to take up careers in IT security.

Around 40,000 currently work in the cyber security sector. But it has been estimated by (ISC)² that there will be a shortage of 1.5 million information security professionals by 2020, due to the increase in demand outweighing the number of viable graduates.

Recognising the global shortage in security skills and the sway this could have on the battle against the bad guys, NCC Group aims to help fill the gap with the Cyber 10K competition.

Paul Vlissidis, director of .trust at NCC Group, says: “Hardly a week goes by without a headline highlighting the digital skills shortage in the UK. In no industry is it more apparent than security, with vulnerable organisations and consumers being targeted every day by the bad guys."

“Ensuring we produce enough security engineers as a country is paramount. To do that we need to make sure those that do choose cyber security as a career path are engaged with industry as soon as possible and have the opportunity to develop their ideas.”

Sound like your bag? Competition details are below.

Timing

Duration: September – November 2015

Entry criteria

• Description of the problem you are trying to solve.
• Description of your solution and how it addresses the problem.
• In addition to the above for an entry to qualify you must include a working prototype – a functional solution which can be used to demonstrate the idea in a reliable manner that accurately shows the idea working.

There are no strict categories. Anything goes as long as it hits the entry criteria, but some areas that you might want to think about include:

• Cloud security
• Cyber incident response and clean-up
• IoT and mobile security of consumers, and user awareness, training and support
• Cyber security on small budgets

The Register is a media partner of Cyber 10K and our security correspondent John Leyden is a member of the judging panel.