University of Warwick Wins Veracode’s First-Ever Hacker Games

 Next Generation of Developers Establish Secure Coding Skills Through Two-Week Competition

BURLINGTON, Mass. – March 31, 2021 – Veracode, the largest global provider of application security testing (AST) solutions, announced today the winner of its first-ever Hacker Games competition, which challenged students to hack and patch real-life apps online. WMG Cyber Security Centre at the University of Warwick was crowned the winner and awarded a $10,000 charitable donation after successfully completing 1,854 challenges over the course of two weeks, while Tufts University took second place and a $5,000 donation. In addition, each individual player from the winning teams and overall top scorers won prize money.

Professor Tim Watson, Director of the WMG Cyber Security Centre at the University of Warwick, said, “The Hacker Games were a fantastic way to promote secure software development and provided our students with a highly challenging experience. The labs are tremendous resources and we will be encouraging our students to take advantage of them to further their skills and experience. We are very grateful to Veracode for creating such a wonderful environment and competition.”

Setting Future Software Developers Up for Success

By empowering the next generation of software developers to write secure code, the Veracode Hacker Games aim to help plug the cybersecurity skills gap. The two-week collegiate competition saw nearly 90 computer science and cybersecurity students from leading universities across the U.S. and U.K. complete hands-on challenges in Veracode Security Labs. Altogether, participants solved a total of 8,500 labs and accumulated nearly 100,000 points.

Chris Wysopal, Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Veracode, said: “The cybersecurity skills gap is proving costly to corporations worldwide. The Hacker Games are a way for us to demonstrate the importance of secure coding to the next generation of software developers. The passion, competitive spirit and commitment from each participating university was impressive and we’re excited to work with each of these schools to make software security a more regular part of their curriculum.”

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