Top Student Geeks Converge on Brooklyn

NYU-Poly's 6th Annual Cyber Security Challenges to Draw Hundreds of Student
Finalists, Corporate Security Chiefs and Cyber Celebrities to Campus This
Friday, Nov. 13

NEW YORK, Nov, 12 /PRNewswire/ -- With the clock ticking toward Friday, Nov.
13, the country's top computer students are preparing to descend upon the
Brooklyn campus of Polytechnic Institute of New York University to compete in
cyber security challenges awarding cash and scholarships to the winners.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20091027/NY99197LOGO )

A record number of students from the United States and Europe participated in
the 6th Annual Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW) Challenges leading up to
the finals at NYU-Poly, home to a leading cyber security academic program.
More than 100 of the best high school, undergraduate and graduate
cyber-security and digital forensics students will travel from as far as
Hawaii and Utah to challenge their peers in the final rounds.

The professionals will nearly match the number of students, as cyber security
chiefs of corporations, branches of the military and government agencies seek
to woo the next generation of digital geniuses who will protect digital
networks and fight cyber crime. Celebrity "white hat" hackers who guard
networks helped design the digital games, and many will serve as judges.

Keynote speaker for the awards ceremony that follows the games will be General
Electric's chief information security officer, Grady Summers. Summers is
known for embracing emerging technology and has pioneered the use of cloud
storage and security as a service to decrease GE's information risk.

The games are run by the graduate students of NYU-Poly's Information Systems
and Internet Security Lab, funded by the National Science Foundation and
headed by Professor Nasir Memon, a prominent cyber-security expert. When the
games were founded, the preliminary rounds spanned a week. Six years later,
the preliminary rounds span nearly all of October, which is National Cyber
Security Month.

"The growth in the NYU-Poly CSAW games parallels the urgency of the issue of
cyber security," Memon said. "Security consultants SANS estimate that the
United States has only 1,000 world-class, technical cyber security
professionals today, and that we will need 20,000 to 30,000 within just a few
years to protect our networks."

Memon continued: "Meanwhile, police forensics departments tell us that
virtually every crime has some digital element and that their digital
forensics labs sometimes have years-long backlogs. Schools like NYU-Poly need
to find and educate students like these, who are capable of designing software
that can cut the backlog and become cyber-investigators themselves."

Although high school students have participated -- and even won -- challenges
in past years, this year marks the first in which a special forensics
challenge was developed for high school teams. More than 80 teams competed in
the first round. Nine high school teams will be among the finalists competing
at NYU-Poly.

Other final rounds will be the Capture the Flag Application Security; the
Embedded Systems Challenge, in which students must defend their chips against
malicious modification during manufacturing; the Research Awards; the Quiz
Tournament, and the Security Awareness Poster Competition. The full list of
finalists can be viewed at http://www.poly.edu/csaw. Top prizes include
graduate-level scholarships to NYU-Poly, recognized as one of the leading
digital security schools in the world.

Memon thanked CSAW sponsors that provide the travel funds and prizes to make
the student-run competition possible. Sponsors are Assured Information
Security, AT&T, BAE Systems, the Center for Advanced Technology in
Telecommunications at NYU-Poly, Cisco, InterDigital, L-3 Communications,
NIKSUN and SANS.

About Polytechnic Institute of New York University
Polytechnic Institute of New York University (formerly Polytechnic
University), an affiliate of New York University, is New York's most
comprehensive school of engineering, applied sciences, technology and
research, and is rooted in Polytechnic's 155-year tradition of invention,
innovation and entrepreneurship -- i-squared-e. The institution, founded in
1854, is one of the nation's oldest private engineering schools. In addition
to its main campus at MetroTech Center in downtown Brooklyn, it offers
programs at sites throughout the region and around the globe. NYU-Poly has
centers in Long Island, Manhattan and Westchester County; globally, it has
programs in Israel, China and will be an integral part of NYU's campus in Abu
Dhabi opening in autumn 2010. For more information, visit www.poly.edu.

SOURCE Polytechnic Institute of New York University

Kathleen Hamilton, +1-718-260-3792 office, +1-973-997-0416 mobile,
hamilton@poly.edu