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back to article New UK cyber-champ: Chemist's winning formula cracks 'F1 race hack'

A 28-year-old chemist is the new UK Cyber Security Champion after triumphing in a year-long competition that tested computer defence skills. Stephen Miller, from Hertfordshire, beat thousands of other hopefuls after competing in several online and face-to-face heats. Miller, who works as a lab team manager at a major …

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  1. Anonymous Custard

    Training?

    He was named as Blighty's e-champion after the final masterclass round of 2013's Cyber Security Challenge UK on Sunday. Miller's prize includes free access to industry training courses.

    So is he receiving the courses, or giving them?

    Given that both he and the runner up weren't formally trained and yet still topped-out the competition it does seem to make the value of that aspect of the prize a bit suspect?

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    1. John H Woods Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Training?

      "Given that both he and the runner up weren't formally trained and yet still topped-out the competition it does seem to make the value of that aspect of the prize a bit suspect?"

      Just reminds me of those super-hard (technical term) crosswords where the prize is ... a dictionary.

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    2. Frankee Llonnygog
      Reply Icon

      Re: Training?

      "Miller's prize includes free access to industry training courses"

      If he's any sort of cyber-security champ, he already has free access to industry training courses - not to mention the trainer's bank account

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Chemist is top e-security bod?

    What did he do? Dissolve all the USB flash drives and ethernet cables in a vat of acid?

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    No

    He just went to a certain shelf, got a product off of it and did this:

    http://tinyurl.com/a46ppu3

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  4. Khaptain Silver badge
    WTF?

    Publicity stunt or serious competition

    Either Stephen Milller is a part time cracker/hacker or this competition was just for hype.

    The article doesn't really mention the level or knowledge that the canditates have. Monitoring switch, router, firewall logs or any other multitude of defense systems is not really a task for the uninitiated, I would have expected a neck beard to have won such a competition.

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  5. lglethal Silver badge
    Go

    What does it say?

    What does it say about UK cyber security experts when the winner of their most elaborate competition is an untrained chemist?

    Or are the real cyber security experts too busy to take part in the competitions?

    (or is the competition a crock of s%*t?)

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    1. Chemist
      Reply Icon

      Re: What does it say?

      "when the winner of their most elaborate competition is an untrained chemist?"

      Now security I will accept is rather a specialist area.

      On the other hand some of the best programmers I've ever met in industry and academia have not been IT specialists. Many have been originally scientists, who writing for their own needs at first, as scientists often need to, have found a niche and moved full-time into scientific programming. Others whilst not getting their hands 'dirty' writing code have generated some wonderful novel algorithms to apply to complex scientific problems.

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    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: What does it say?

      As a fellow contestant I will attest to his performance in the challenges which included Incident Response and policy creation.

      The competition was only open to people not currently working in a cyber security role.

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      1. asdf
        Reply Icon
        FAIL

        Re: What does it say?

        >The competition was only open to people not currently working in a cyber security role.

        Gee it might have been nice for the author of the article to mention this considering it affects the context of the entire article in a big way. Usually El Reg journalists can pass for somewhat competent reporters/writers but bad fail in this case. Anyway thxs for clarifying AC.

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  6. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Happy

    Always good to hear someone from the 'outside' surprising the professionals - keeps them on their toes.

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