July 25, 2016
At this year’s DEF CON security conference scheduled to be held in Las Vegas at the start of August, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will be giving away a total of $4 million to seven teams participating in the Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC).
Started in 2014, the Cyber Grand Challenge is a classic CTF (Capture The Flag) competition, but with a kink.
Instead of pinning two teams of security researchers against each other in an attempt to hack and/or protect a network or device, the CGC will have the seven teams battle using automated computer programs that are built to hack other systems and to automatically detect and fix weaknesses on their own.
CGC competition started two years ago
The qualification rounds for this event started in 2014, with 28 teams signing up for the challenge. While DARPA funded a few top-notch teams to encourage them to participate in the challenge, most groups that signed up were self-funded.
Three DARPA-funded teams qualified for the final round and four self-funded teams.
These seven will be battling for the top $2 million prize on August 4, 2016, at DEF CON in the Paris Las Vegas Hotel’s 5,000-person-capacity auditorium.