Cyber Trends 2022 Powered By Hack The Box & Check Point Software Technologies

After the great success of the HTB University CTF 2021 qualifier round, with more than 500 teams participating from 72 different countries and territories, we are now getting ready to host the Finals and finally find out who will be the grand winner.

The HTB University CTF Finals will start on the 25th of March at 1 PM UTC and will last for exactly 24 hours. The best 19 teams coming out from the qualifiers round will be trying to hack 16 new challenges: do you feel the competition vibes already?

Prior to the competition, all the 171 finalists are invited to the pre-event talk hosted by our exclusive diamond CTF sponsor Check Point Software Technologies.

Title: Cyber Trends 2022
Date and time: March 9th, 2022 - 5 PM UTC
Speaker: Sergey Shykevich
Duration: 1 hour
*The event is free and open only to the CTF finalists and held via Zoom (details will be communicated directly to the participants).

Sergey Shykevich currently leads the threat intelligence group of Check Point, which monitors, analyzes, and researches cyber threats around the world. Prior to joining Check Point, Sergey led cyber threat intelligence and cyber defense teams in the elite Unit 8200 of the Israeli Intelligence Forces. More recently, Sergey led the threat intelligence and the research in Q6 Cyber, a US-based cybercrime intelligence company.

The event will introduce how the company aspires to educate future security experts, providing worldwide cybersecurity education through partnerships with higher learning institutions with Check Point Secure Academy. The talk will then focus on the latest cybersecurity trends of 2022. Find below a small preview:

“Taiwan’s MediaTek has been the global smartphone chip leader since Q3 2020. MediaTek SoCs are embedded in approximately 37% of all smartphones and IoT devices in the world, including high-end phones from Xiaomi, Oppo, Realme, Vivo, and more. Modern MediaTek SoCs, including the latest Dimensity series, contains a special audio DSP to improve media performance and reduce CPU usage. In this study, we reverse-engineered the MediaTek audio DSP firmware and the proprietary Android API that is responsible for communication with the audio processor. We discovered several vulnerabilities in the DSP RTOS and Android HAL that are accessible from the Android userspace. The issues we found could lead to LPE from an Android application.”

We believe the talk will be highly valuable for the finalists, giving a great overview of the current cybersecurity scenario and getting them ready for the upcoming competition.

See you there!
Hack The Box Team