KPN Blueteam second at the SOC X World Championship

The Blue team of KPN CISO, which protects our networks and IT against cyberattacks such as hacks, DDoS and ransomware and which follows up IT security incidents, came in second at the SOC X World Championship for Security Operations Centers. The championship, in which 51 teams representing companies from 15 countries took part, was held online. The participating teams have to trace a complicated problem and find the right solution to it (detect and respond).

“SOC X is a serious international competition,” says Paul Slootmaker, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at KPN. “Our second-place finish shows that we are among the very best in the security world. I’m extremely proud of our team and it’s good news for KPN and its customers as well, of course.”

The competition started on Thursday, March 4 at 16.00 and went on till midnight. During that period, the teams had access to a compromised network of SOC X and had digital forensic and incident tools at their disposal to get the job done.

After eight hours hard work the KPN team, comprising Rob Kuiters (captain), Arnim Eijkhoudt, Laurens van Dijk, Sebastiaan Groot and Cristian Mikehazi, earned 7360 points. The top team was that of Blackberry with 7710 points, with the Airbus team in third place with 7190 points.

The remaining top ten teams were Bell Canada, Bechtel, Yandex LLC, Hacknowledge, Nexthink, USAF 92nd CyberOperations Squadron and Texas Instruments SOC.