Reporter: Rocío Castañeda / Photographer: Israel Vera
In Medellín, Colombia, they stood out at the Latin America Cybersecurity Challenge, outperforming several countries.
The team “Mexploiters”, composed of three students from the Escuela Superior de Cómputo (ESCOM) and one student from the Unidad Profesional Interdisciplinaria de Ingeniería y Ciencias Sociales y Administrativas (UPIICSA), earned second place at the Latin America Cybersecurity Challenge (LACC), an international cybersecurity tournament that brought together young talent, specialists, and key institutions from across the region.
In this first edition held in Medellín, Colombia, participants included Luis Eduardo Platero Fuentes, Ryan Nathanael Cruz Barragán, and Owen Uriel Bejarano García, students of Computer Systems Engineering at ESCOM, as well as Pedro Tristán Suárez Mendoza, who is pursuing a Bachelor’s in Computer Science at UPIICSA.
The Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN) students outperformed teams from Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic, among other participating countries. The contest was ultimately won by the Chilean delegation by a matter of seconds.
Organized in the Capture The Flag (CTF) format and supported by the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA), the technical challenge lasted more than seven hours. It required participants to identify vulnerabilities, develop code to eliminate them, and exploit them to capture the “LACC flag,” which served as the solution to the challenge.
The young politécnicos faced 25 cybersecurity challenges, demonstrating their expertise in cryptography, digital forensics, networking, and web exploitation.
This achievement strengthens the international prestige of IPN, ESCOM, and UPIICSA as training grounds for cybersecurity talent and adds to the track record of politécnico students in high-level competitions, where they have also excelled in tournaments such as HackMex 7, further enhancing their preparation for highly specialized challenges.
INSTITUTO POLITÉCNICO NACIONAL
D.R. Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN). Av. Luis Enrique Erro S/N, Unidad Profesional Adolfo López Mateos, Zacatenco, Alcaldía Gustavo A. Madero, C.P. 07738, Ciudad de México. Conmutador: 55 57 29 60 00 / 55 57 29 63 00.
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