Law students finalists in Cyber Security Awareness Week Competition

Law+students+finalists+in+Cyber+Security+Awareness+Week+Competition

By Daily Illini Staff Report

Four University Law students advanced to the final round of the NYU Tandon College of Engineering’s annual Cyber Security Awareness Week games. The students were selected as finalists for the Law & Policy competition within the games.

There are over 400 people across 29 North American teams competing, including University students Kathleen Kramer, McKensie Meadows, Bradley Williams and Krista Gaedtke.

According to NYU’s press release, the C.S.A.W. games is the world’s largest student-led cyber security contest. The event itself will be hosted at multiple locations around the world, including IIT Kanpur, NYU Abu Dhabi and Grenoble INP-Esisar.

The event contains many different competitions, including a “Capture the Flag” competition, in which the University team is competing. For this event, the teams have to earn points by completing real world cyber security challenges. 

U.S. contestants in the Law & Policy Competition are required to submit written legal arguments on the topic of disclosure of investigative methods that use computer code.

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“12,000 people competed remotely in preliminaries from all over the world,” said Karl Greenberg, Media Relations Specialist at NYU Tandon’s School of Engineering.

The finalists attended the event at NYU Tandon on Nov. 10 to give oral arguments in front of a panel of judges, who questioned them in the style of an appellate court.

NYU Tandon is awarding scholarships and immediate admission into its doctoral programs to winners of the engineering competitions. The three top teams of the Law & Policy Competition will be awarded cash prizes of $1000, $750 and $500.

Other competitions include a Forensics competition for high school students and the Embedded Security Challenge, the oldest and largest hardware hacking competition in the world.

Greenberg explained that the purpose of combining legal theory and cybersecurity is that, as of now, the laws concerning cybersecurity are outdated.

“Legal theory is behind reality as we move toward cybersecurity measures that can track people, identify potential criminals and gather evidence, at the expense, potentially, of personal privacy,” he said.

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