Faculty of Science and Technology

A student from Lancaster University has been named the UK winner of the DC3 Digital Forensics Challenge, a global competition designed and hosted by the US Department of Defense that forms part of the Cyber Security Challenge UK.

Christopher Richardson, currently studying for a PhD in intrusion detection systems, took the top prize and booked his place in the UK Challenge's face-to-face play-offs amongst winners from other competitions, at the start of next year. He registered the highest score achieved in the UK stream of the competition so far and beat 185 fellow countrymen to claim top spot. Christopher's performance, under the pseudonym 'Ikarus', saw him ranked 9th globally amongst 1,791 competitors from 52 countries.

The DC3 Digital Forensics Challenge is a global challenge designed and hosted by the US Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center. Players from all over the world compete in what is considered one of the toughest forensic challenges in the world. It takes the form of several individual scenario-based challenges representing the complexity that digital forensics examiners face extracting and scrutinising data to solve cyber crime. Areas covered include file signatures, hashing metadata, data hiding, communication recovery, and information concealment. There are even a few problems that have not yet been fully resolved.

"It was difficult in parts but really enjoyable," says Chris. "I have always had an interest in a wide range of security areas both inside and outside of my academic speciality and this competition gave me a platform to test my skills on practical problems with real world relevance. After getting stuck a couple of times, I didn't think I had done that well, but to win the UK stream and do so well across the whole competition feels great."

Thu 15 December 2011