Nigerians To Represent Africa At The Hacker Olympics

Nigeria To Fly African Flag At Global Cyberlympics

A Nigerian Team of cyber security professionals “TeamNaija” will be representing the African continent at Washington, DC in this year’s Cyberlympics event. The team is made up of Wale Obadare (Digital Encode), Uchenna Aka (FirstBank), David Abolusoro (FirstBank), Rotimi Akinyele (BDO UAE), Bimbo Jaiyeola (Union bank) and the team captain Oluseyi Akindeinde (Digital Encode).

Global Cyberlympics is a hands on cyber security team game sport that brings together the best ethical hackers from around the world to compete in a series of Forensics, Penetration testing, Computer Network Defense, and Capture the Flag Challenges. This year’s competition was full of intrigues as the participants were given hardened systems to break into and other complex tasks to complete within limited time.

The teams had to go through 3 rounds while the number of teams proceeding to the next stage kept reducing until the end of the Final round where TeamNaija emerged first and another Nigerian Team Hawx came second. Judging was based on the speed at which systems were hacked, the number of vulnerabilities found and the techniques used to uncover them.

TeamNaija had competed in 2012 and represented the continent at the world Finals in Miami where they had a very good outing.

The team has since then, built capacity over the years to world standard with the ability to match the skills of the best in the field.

Among the 6 team members, they have over 50 IT Certifications which include CISSP, CCNP, OSCP, ISO 27001:LI, PCIP, PCI-ISA, SECURITY +, CSA, MSA, C|EH, E|CSA, L|PT, eCPPT, FBCS, ECSP, CHFI, CITP, CCNA,CCDP,CCIE(written),SNAA,QCS, ISO 20000:LA, ISO27001:LA, ISO 22301:LA, PCIQSA, COBIT 5 ASSESSOR, MCSE and CRISC, to mention a few.

A member of the team, Rotimi Akinyele, who currently works with BDO UAE, and consults for UAE government entities, said despite competing against the best-of-the-best in the whole world, the team was very confident of winning and returning as champions.

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