U.S. hackers fail to claim $100,000 Israeli cyber challenge prize

While hundreds arrived at the company's event in Atlanta, they all failed.

Employees, mostly veterans of military computing units, use keyboards as they work at a cyber hotline facility at Israel's Computer Emergency Response Centre (CERT) in Beersheba, southern Israel (photo credit: REUTERS/AMIR COHEN)
Employees, mostly veterans of military computing units, use keyboards as they work at a cyber hotline facility at Israel's Computer Emergency Response Centre (CERT) in Beersheba, southern Israel
(photo credit: REUTERS/AMIR COHEN)
Can anyone crack Israeli cybersecurity company Cyber 2.0’s infamous hacking challenge? The answer is not yet.
 
Rishon Lezion-based Cyber 2.0 boasts that its system provides “total defense against the spread of cyberattacks” within companies’ organizational networks and even offered a $100,000 cash prize this month to any US-based engineer that could successfully hack the platform.
 
While hundreds arrived at the company’s event in Atlanta, they all failed. Now promising an increasingly generous reward every month, the company will open the challenge to a worldwide audience.
 
“We are putting our money on it, and putting our reputation and everything at stake, because we believe in the company,” Cyber 2.0 vice president sales Sneer Rozenfeld told CBS.
 
Unlike existing defensive and offensive cyberattack prevention systems based on so-called “biological models” and focusing on detection of malicious software and prevention of threats, Cyber 2.0 says its system is based on an unbreachable mathematical chaos model.
 
Founded in 2015 by Hertzel Ozer and Erez Kaplan, the company claims that the chance of cracking its system is equivalent to the chance of accurately predicting the weather forecast in 10 years’ time, on any given day, at any given time, for any given place.
 
Seemingly maintaining the integrity of their claims, the system has thwarted all those who have attempted to hack it since January 2016. Prior to the latest US hackers challenge, contenders have included a leading foreign and Israeli hacking company, and an Israeli hackers challenge in June 2018 offering NIS 100,000.
 
Hackers from both Israel’s military and civilian sectors, as well as computer science students from the Rishon Lezion College of Management Academic Studies all failed to crack the system.