Celebrating Cyber Event
Cyber threats are increasingly affecting all of us as individuals and also all types of private and public sector organisations. As cyber threats become more sophisticated and pervasive, we all need to be more cyber-aware and resilient, and all organisations across the globe are seeking cyber professionals who understand how do prepare and protect their organisation from cyber-attacks. To help raise awareness on cyber security and online safety among more people, Institute of Cyber Security for Society (iCSS) at the University of Kent, KMCC (Kent & Medway Cyber Cluster Ltd) and KMCS3 (Kent & Medway Cyber Security Student Society) jointly organised the 2023-24 CyberAnything Competition.
In addition, to help equip more people with cyber security skills and to fill the cyber skills gap in many industrial sectors, iCSS has established an academic partnership with ISC2, the world’s leading not-for-profit member association for cyber security professionals, to organise cyber security certification training activities. Such activities are delivered jointly with KMCC as iCSS’s strategic partner. An ongoing project in this area is the ISC2-iCSS-KMCC 1MCC campaign, for encouraging more people to consider ISC2’s beginner-facing cyber security certification CC. Another planned activity is a pilot summer training course for ISC2’s more advanced cyber security certification CISSP.
Call for Submissions
Together with the University of Kent’s Institute of Cyber Security for Society (iCSS) and KMCS3 (Kent & Medway Cyber Security Student Society), KMCC is co-organising a CyberAnything Competition.
We increasingly rely upon digital, networked and smart technologies such as mobile devices and the internet to live our lives. Or we can say that we are living in the Internet of Everything (IoE), a cyber-physical world where so many hardware devices, software systems, physical things, systems and people are now interconnected. However, the cyber elements of our lives and how security, privacy and safety of such elements affect our lives are not always visible or overlooked, and sometimes intentionally concealed. They are often so entrenched in our way of being that we overlook our reliance upon them until they stop functioning, e.g., when a power cut, server downtime or an empty battery hits us.
This competition welcomes anything that is cyber-related in our daily lives. You can use your camera or other image-capturing device to capture a moment as a photo or a short video, or create a drawing, or prepare an infographic such as a flyer or a PowerPoint slide, or write an essay or even a poem, or make a 3-D printed object or a hand-crafted artefact, etc., which can tell a story about living, learning and connecting in the cyber or cyber-physical world in the past, at present, and/or in the future. You are also welcome to try generative AI for creating your submission, but in this case please describe which generative AI tool(s) were used and how you used it/them, e.g., prompt(s) you used to create the submission.
Submitted artefacts will be judged for the following prizes in the following four categories: 1) current staff of the University of Kent, 2) current students of the University of Kent, 3) alumni of the University of Kent, and 4) any UK residents who are 13 years old or above and have never been affiliated with the University of Kent. The cash prizes will be jointly sponsored by KMCC and iCSS. We also welcome other sponsors to create more cash prize, including for some sub-competitions dedicated to specific sub-groups of people. Please contact [email protected] if you are interested in being a sponsor and/or organising a sub-competition.
- 4 Best Overall Prizes (one per category, £80 Amazon e-voucher per prize),
- 4 Most Creative Prizes (one per category, £80 Amazon e-voucher per prize), and
- 8 Runner-Up Prizes (two per category; £20 Amazon e-voucher per prize).
Please note that this competition is designed for UK residents and student/staff/alumni of the University of Kent only. If you are/were not affiliated with the University of Kent, you will be asked to confirm that you are a UK resident to be eligible for the competition. In addition, you must be 13 years old or above so that you can legally provide your own consent according to the UK data protection law (UK GDPR).
To help you think about cyber security related scenarios, please watch the following animated video iCSS produced recently:
The deadline for submission is Wednesday 6 March 2024 23:59pm (extended). We plan to announce the prize winners in late March 2024.
To submit, please click or scan the following QR code:
If you have any questions or queries or want to submit physical objects, please contact KMCC via [email protected] or iCSS via [email protected].
See below for a flyer of this competition (click it to download a high-resolution PDF file). Please feel free to use it in whatsoever ways you see fit to let more know about and participate in the competition!
