we witnessed the largest university cyberwar in France

“We have the WiFi code!” says Thomas, satisfied, to the troops gathered around him, under one of the army tents placed in the gymnasium. By finding the WiFi code of the opposing camp, his team, Cryptanga, has just scored a good point against Anuméric: “On is rather advantageous because we will be able to analyze the data passing through the network“, smiles the Polytech Nancy student.

A small victory among others during these two days of Cyber ​​Humanum Est, a cyberwar which pits around a hundred students against the IUT Nancy-Brabois in Villers-lès-Nancy (Meurthe-et-Moselle), the largest exercise of university cybersecurity in France. For its fourth edition, organized in particular by the Cyber ​​Defense Command, the Ministry of the Armed Forces and the University of Lorraine, the event called on students from local major schools (Faculty of Science and Technology, IUT Nancy-Brabois, Mines Nancy, Polytech Nancy, Télécom Nancy and the UFR Human and Social Sciences) in addition to a few Luxembourgish BTS students.

Find vulnerabilities in each server

Everyone knows the scenario constructed for the occasion: climate change having swept away its beaches and its tourist industry, the Riverchelles archipelago finds itself obliged to offer a contract for the exploitation of its lithium resources to its two neighbors, Cryptanga and Anumeric. Each team must now do everything to find the flaws, the vulnerabilities, planned in the servers of the opposite camp and protect their own interests.

On the team’s other table, two students are leaning over a radio transmitter/receiver, connected to the laptop. A tool “collected in the opposing embassy“, specifies Evan, student at Telecom Nancy, and who serves to ensure”secure communications, with encrypted broadcasts, and another channel where they send compressed emails, again encrypted. So we try to decipher everything“.

Cryptanga and Anuméric are not the only protagonists of the exercise. A third team made up of around fifteen people constitutes the “APT 54”, hackers responsible for carrying out computer hacking and who can sell their services to the highest bidder to attack opposing infrastructures. As Antoine Le Solleuz, director of studies at the Nancy School of Mines, explains, “for example, they can hack trains. The idea is then to show through the media that a particular country is not capable of managing its public transport. In each team, there is therefore a ‘media’ unit, which will influence the opinion of the population“.

Media and social networks, the management of “influence mechanisms”

In addition to technical knowledge, the “struggle for influence” aspect is at the heart of the exercise. This is evidenced by the articles published on “Le pigeon déchaîné”, an online media which reveals cases of suspected cheating in both camps, or the approximately 10,000 false accounts created on a fictitious social network, responsible for discrediting this or that team. in “making noise“, in the words of reserve captain Jean-Philippe, director of Cyber ​​Humanum Est.

“This is exactly what is happening, for example, in Africa. he continues, with the Russian disinformation campaign against the French state. We will have the same mechanisms of informational influence which will be implemented, both to counter fake news and to provide real information, all within a legal framework since we do not have the right to create fake news. news“.

The army wants to identify “interesting profiles”

Exercise is not just fun. Supervised by around fifteen soldiers, it also aims to introduce cybersecurity professions to students or “to look at interesting profiles and the best of them“, recognizes General Aymeric Bonnemaison, commander of cyber defense, “to then offer them contracts and bring them into our armies to come and serve for a few years“.

HAS Following the exercise, a careers forum will take place on Friday with the army, but also with private partners (Thalès, Siemens, Capgemini, Orange, etc.), “because we all need the average level of our companies to rise in the ‘cyber’ domain so that we are collectively better protected“, continues General Bonnemaison. Today, the army has around 4,000 cyber combatants and plans to recruit 1,000 more by 2030. In terms of competition, the winner of this 2024 edition will be chosen on Thursday during the day.