Who will join the next
Italian Cyberdefender Team?

Who will join the next
Italian Cyberdefender Team?

Team Composition Rules

TeamItaly 2026

Every year, the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) organizes the European Cybersecurity Challenge (ECSC) to favor the exchange of knowledge and talents from all Europe. The competion is open to all European countries, and each participating nation organizes a team composed by 10 players, distributed between juniors (between 14 and 20 years old) and seniors (between 21 and 25 years old).
The 2026 edition of the European Cybersecurity Challenge will be held from October 12th to October 16th, 2026, in Bochum, Germany.
TeamItaly is the Italian Cyberdefender national team, which represents Italy in this and other international competitions. The best talents between the age of 14 and 25 can compete to get a spot in this team through a selection process structured in three main phases:
  • Phase 1: individuation of up to 60 national talents.
  • Phase 2: selection of 20 team members selected from the 60 chosen talents.
  • Phase 3: selection of the 10 team members for ECSC 2026.
What follows is the details of the three phases.

Phase 1: January 2026 - June 2026

The first selection phase will lead to the selection of at most 60 candidates for the making of TeamItaly 2026.
The following prerequisites must be met in order to participate in this phase:
  • Junior category: born between January 1st, 2006 and December 31st, 2011
  • Senior category: born between January 1st, 2001 and December 31st, 2005
Talents will be selected based on the following criteria:
  • the best 5 talents from OliCyber.IT 2026
  • the best 8 talents from CyberChallenge.IT 2026
  • the best 36 talents from the TeamItaly 2026 official selection event.
  • at most 11 talents who have demonstrated great value in the past either in TeamItaly or, more in general, in the Italian CTF community.
What follows is more information regarding the aformentioned competitions, providing more details about the specific selection criteria.

OliCyber.IT 2026

The Italian Olympiads in Cybersecurity (OliCyber.IT), organized by the CINI Cybersecurity National Lab, are a competition program aimed at connecting secondary school students with the issues of cybersecurity.
The selection for TeamItaly will consider the results of the national competition, trying to balance the demonstrated skills in the various challenge categories.

CyberChallenge.IT 2026

CyberChallenge.IT is the first national cybersecurity training program for university and secondary school students, organized by the CINI Cybersecurity National Lab.
The selection for TeamItaly will consider the results of the local competition held on May 27th 2026, trying to balance the demonstrated skills in the various challenge categories and considering the two age categories defined by ECSC 2026.

Official selection event for TeamItaly 2026

Wednesday, May 27th, 2026, the official selection for TeamItaly 2026 will take place. It is a Jeopardy CTF lasting 7 hours, held onsite in the CyberChallenge.IT venues, that will cover cryptography, binary exploitation, reverse engineering, web security and miscellaneous.
The use of any kind of AI tool is strictly forbidden during the competition. Participants are required to record their screen for the entire duration of the competition and to share the recording with the organizers at the end. More details about the rules of the competition and how to register to compete onsite will be provided later.
At the end of the competition, a general leaderboard will be generated, as well as specific leaderboards for each category, i.e. leaderboards generated considering only the challenges related to one category. Specifically, the next phase will be accessible to at most 6 people for each of the following leaderboards:
  • general leaderboard
  • cryptography
  • binary exploitation
  • reverse engineering
  • web security
  • miscellaneous
The top 6 people from each leaderboard will be selected in order to guarantee at least 3 junior players.
In case one player will be present in more than one leaderboard (ex. general leaderboard and "cryptography" leaderboard), the organizers will be able to choose whether to move up the rankings or not.
In case of an insufficient number of players with at least one solve in some category leaderboard, the organizers will be able to move the rankings from the general leaderboard.

Phase 2: June - August 2026

Starting from the second half of June 2026, and up to the middle of August 2026, the participants selected during phase 1 will be involved in an online training and selection phase. In this phase, meetings will be held involving advanced security concepts, in order to expand the knowledge gained by the CyberChallenge.IT and OliCyber.IT programs. During this phase, participants will also play online CTF events, with the aim of better evaluating each's skillset and improving teamwork.
Commitment, participation to the meetings, and results achieved in online CTFs, will be used as metrics to select the 20 team members (10 juniors and 10 seniors) that will access the last phase.

Phase 3: September 2026

During September 2026, admitted players will be meeting each other for a week-long retreat. At the end of the bootcamp, the final 10 players (5 juniors and 5 seniors) representing Italy at the European Cyber Security Challenge 2026 in October will be selected and announced.