The Accenture European Student Battle
On Thursday, October 7th, I had the opportunity to compete in the Accenture European Student Battle.
What is it?
In this battle, I was representing the Netherlands.
During the challenge, I had to coordinate my skills and knowledge with my three teammates, and we competed against students from other countries.
The assignment was to work together to tackle a Cyber Resilient Behavior problem. This year, we had to develop a solution to a ransomware problem. For those, unfamiliar with the concept, a ransomware is a form of cryptovirology virus that threatens to publish or permanently limit access to the victim’s personal data unless a ransom is paid. The WannaCry attack is commonly used to demonstrate a ransomware attack. It was a global cyberattack in May 2017 by the WannaCry ransomware cryptoworm, which encrypted data and demanded Bitcoin ransom payments from computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system.
The objective of this battle was to demonstrate our abilities, become a cybersecurity behavior champion, and get acquainted with Accenture. From this perspective, we were able to attend a presentation of the company as well as a day in the shoes of a consultant at Accenture after the challenge.
So, what is Accenture?
Accenture is a global professional services firm established in Ireland that specializes in IT services and consulting. It was launched in 1989.
Accenture employs 624K people globally, is presents in 200 cities, spread across 50 countries, serves over 6K clients in over 120 countries, and has 8200 patents and patents pending worldwide. So you see, it’s a multinational company that provides advice to clients.
Yesterday, we got the opportunity to speak with the team in charge of changing customers’ cyber behavior in order to make them more cyber resilient.
What is cyber resilience?
Cyber resilience is the capacity to anticipate, respond to, and recover from cyber attacks.
It has evolved in recent years as standard cyber security measures are no longer sufficient to defend organizations from a slew of continuous attacks. Cyber resilience assists an organization in protecting against cyber risks, defending against and limiting the severity of attacks, and ensuring its continuing survival in the face of an attack.
My impression
Unfortunately, my team did not win, but it does not matter because we gave it our all. I saw it as an excellent chance to learn about the consulting industry and meet others who were interested in the same topics that I was.
I was able to comprehend the issues around cyber security and acquire new ideas that I will be able to apply in the future. Finally, I like Accenture’s desire to form a team comprised of IT specialists as well as individuals from diverse backgrounds (policy, psychology…).
