Andrey Kornyushin, one of the founders and head of the Code.ak project
Two student teams from the Faculty of Environmental Engineering and Municipal Services of the St Petersburg State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering demonstrated a high level of training in the field of information security at the MIA_CTF competition, organized by the St Petersburg University of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia jointly with theAssociation of Chief Information Security Officer (ACISO).
The event brought together over 100 teams from the country's leading technical universities and vocational schools. Over eight hours, participants had to tackle a variety of cybersecurity challenges: from decrypting messages and finding software bugs to investigating digital traces and discovering secrets hidden within ordinary files.
The SPbGASU teams, trained as part of our university's student digital learning project Code.ak, have confirmed the university's high status as a center of excellence not only in construction and architecture, but also in modern digital technologies. The first team, consisting of students from the Faculty of Environmental Engineering and Municipal Services (EE&MS), majoring in Information Systems and Technologies, Andrey Kornyushin, Kirill Fershtadt, Denis Kuznetsov, Rostislav Koverda (fourth-year students), and Maksim Suvalko (second-year student), solved 18 problems, scoring 6,376 points. This result allowed the students to take an honorable 10th place overall (sixth among higher education institutions).
The second team of the university consisting of students of the Faculty of EE&MS Vladimir Bulykin (Applied Informatics, second year), Anastasia Ryazanova (Applied Mathematics and Informatics, second year) and Kirill Astashov (Applied Mathematics and Informatics, first year), successfully cracked 10 problems, earning 1394 points, and secured the 38th position among hundreds of participants.
Participation of these two teams allowed SPbGASU to confirm its status, joining the top six universities in the country and becoming one of the leading educational institutions in St Petersburg. Such high rankings in a competition involving departmental and technical universities training specialists specifically in the field of computer security demonstrate the growing quality of practical training for cybersecurity specialists at the SPbGASU Department of Information and Mathematical Modeling Technologies.
The students demonstrated not only deep technical knowledge, but also the ability to work as a team under tight time constraints and high pressure: if many teams successfully solved a given problem, the number of points awarded for that problem was reduced to increase the value of solving more complex problems that few succeeded with.
Our university is increasingly winning awards at prestigious IT forums. In addition to the core curriculum, a significant role is played by the student project Code.ak, which explores the latest programming stacks (sets of technologies for creating applications). The information gained through this project helps unlock the potential of students as programmers—young professionals aspiring to work in the fields of development, testing, and computer security. Its main goal is to train and engage students in IT competitions and real-world projects, creating opportunities to expand their developer portfolios, and offering financial incentives for student-developed products. The project helps bridge the gap between the IT market and universities.
We congratulate our participants on their excellent results and wish them new victories!