Inaugural Award for Cybersecurity Journalism Honors WIRED’s Andy Greenberg for Reporting Russia’s Hack of the Ukraine Grid
Judges in NYU’s Giant Cyber Security Awareness Week Competitions Recognized Reporting that Predicted Hacking in the United States
WIRED'S Andy Greenberg, winner of the inaugural CSAW Cyber Journalism Award, pictured with NYU Tandon professor Ramesh Karri, at the 14th annual Cyber Security Awareness Week at NYU Tandon School of Engineering in Brooklyn. Credit: NYU Tandon, Elena Olivo
BROOKLYN, New York – WIRED magazine's July 2017 cover story, Lights Out: How An Entire Nation Became Russia's Test Lab for Cyberwar, won the inaugural NYU Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW) Cyber Journalism Award. Its author, Andy Greenberg, accepted the award last night during the kickoff of the final round of the world’s largest student-led security games, held on three continents.
Greenberg is a senior writer for WIRED, covering security, privacy, information freedom, and hacker culture. He is the author of the book This Machine Kills Secrets, about WikiLeaks, cryptography, and the cypherpunks, which was selected as an Editor’s Choice by The New York Times Book Review in 2012. Before coming to WIRED, he worked as a senior reporter for Forbes magazine. Greenberg received his bachelor’s degree from Haverford College and a master’s degree from New York University’s Business and Economic Reporting program. He lives in Brooklyn.
The feature story was published in the July issue of WIRED after six months of investigative reporting and interviews in the United States and Ukraine, and Greenberg continues to follow the story today. His warning that Ukraine could prove a precursor to Russian attacks on the power grid in the United States proved even more immediately prescient than anticipated: Within months of his story, reporters at The New York Times and Washington Post revealed such Russian incursions. NotPetya, the malware strongly linked to the Ukrainian hacks, has quickly spread internationally and damages have been estimated at $1 billion.
The award presentation and the keynote address by Andrew Tannenbaum, chief cybersecurity counsel at IBM, opened the 15th annual CSAW student challenges at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, where hundreds of high school, undergraduate and graduate students are competing in six different challenges through Saturday, November 11. Simultaneous CSAW finals are being held at NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD); the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IIT Kanpur); Grenoble INP-Esisar in Valence, France; and Ben-Gurion University in the Advanced Technology Park in Negev, Israel (where CSAW runs November 12-13).
New for 2017, the Cyber Journalism Award recognizes excellence in reporting on cyber security across all journalistic categories. It is a joint project of NYU Tandon and the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Ramesh Karri, NYU Tandon professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Charles Seife, professor at the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, conceived the CSAW Cyber Journalism Award.
The CSAW games were founded in 2003 as a small contest by and for NYU Tandon students; CSAW has grown to become the most comprehensive set of challenges by and for students around the globe. NYU students continue to design the contests under the mentorship of information security professionals and faculty. NYU Tandon’s student-led Offensive Security, Incident Response and Internet Security (OSIRIS) laboratory, home to weekly student-led Hack Night training and student research, leads the CSAW High School Forensics and Capture The Flag. Students from the NYU School of Law design the CSAW Law & Policy Challenge, and students at the partner universities take leadership roles at their respective CSAW hubs.
CSAW’17 North American Sponsors are: Gold Level — Capsule8, IBM, the United States Navy Office of Naval Research, Palo Alto Networks; Silver Level — BAE Systems, Bridgewater; Bronze Level — Bloomberg, Facebook, Jane Street, Jefferies, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Raytheon, RBC Capital Markets, TD Bank, Uber; Supporting Level — Cubic Corporation, William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, National Security Agency, NCC Group, Rhymetec, The Ruth & Jerome A. Siegel Foundation, United States Secret Service; Contributing — Applied Computer Security Associates, Carnegie Mellon University, CTFd, Optiv, Red Balloon Security, Sandia National Laboratories.
Note: Images at http://dam.engineering.nyu.edu/?c=1997&k=f594594911.
About the NYU Tandon School of Engineering
The NYU Tandon School of Engineering dates to 1854, when the NYU School of Civil Engineering and Architecture as well as the Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute (widely known as Brooklyn Poly) were founded. Their successor institutions merged in January 2014 to create a comprehensive school of education and research in engineering and applied sciences, rooted in a tradition of invention, innovation and entrepreneurship. In addition to programs at its main campus in downtown Brooklyn, it is closely connected to engineering programs in NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai, and it operates business incubators in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn. engineering.nyu.edu.
