PHDays Young School: Young Information Security Specialists Wanted

To understand what a fragile digital world we are living in now, it’s not necessary to read the news: just watch the TV shows. Nicholas Brody from Homeland gives the terrorist a code from the US Vice President’s pacemaker, Dexter’s opponent hacks the computer to compromise the protagonist, and the Breaking Bad character de-magnetizes the hard drive with evidence in a police station’s laptop.

Thanks to the universal computerization of modern attackers can equally easily teleport any necessary command that the home TV with SmartTV shell, that the industrial robot in a car factory. Every day around the world recorded 10 million attacks on computer networks.
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Conducting an annual competition among young researchers, we are trying to understand - is there a country that is inhabited by terrible “Russian hackers”, young and talented information security specialists, who can stop the looming chaos on the planet in the future?

On January 25, on Student's Day, the acceptance of applications for participation in the all-Russian PHDays Young School competition opens. His goal is to find promising researchers in the university community.

The competition is intended for students, graduate students and independent young scientists conducting original research in the following areas of information security:

• new attacks, classes of vulnerabilities, ways to bypass the defense mechanisms;
• web application security;
• detection of malware, methods of countering it;
• anonymity on the Internet;
• security of mobile devices and applications;
• operating system security;
• detection of network attacks, methods of counteraction;
• counteraction to spam, phishing and other “social” attacks.

The winners will be determined by leading experts from the information security industry and research laboratories from Positive Technologies, Microsoft, Advanced Monitoring, ERPScan, Yandex, Hacker magazine, VMK MSU, MEPI, SPIIRAN, Darmstadt Technical and Tubingen Universities, Defcon Russia Group.

Receipt of applications and abstracts will end on March 1, 2013. The program committee will select the eight best works whose authors will take part in the final of the competition. The winners will be invited to the Positive Hack Days III forum, where they will be able to present the results of their research to the world's largest information security experts. In addition, all eight studies will be published in peer-reviewed journals from the list of WAC. The winner of the competition - the author of the strongest work - will get a special prize.

The competition of young researchers in the field of information security is held for the second time. For the first time PHDays Young School was held in 2012. Representatives of leading IT companies (Microsoft, Yandex and others), educational and scientific institutions (MSU, MEPI, SPIIRAN) and specialized publications (Hacker magazine) reviewed 19 applications and chose the seven most curious. The guys from the educational institutions of Krasnoyarsk, Moscow, Novosibirsk, St. Petersburg and Taganrog reached the PHDays Young School final.

To participate in the competition, you must familiarize yourself with the rules for drafting abstracts of the report and submit an application with contact information at: youngschool@phdays.com before March 1, 2013.