Dragoș Ionică and Adrian Dincă are world champions in cyber security, winning one of the most prestigious cybersecurity competitions in the medical field.
The Romanians won the cybersecurity competition for the second time PHOTO: D. Ionică’s personal archive
The two, along with three other American teammates, won first place in a competition dedicated to the security of medical equipment. The competition, organized as part of the largest hacking and security conference, recently took place in Las Vegas and is the global event that all cybersecurity enthusiasts want to attend.
Who are the Romanians, what challenges have they had?
The winners of the 32nd edition of the BioHacking Village competition, a contest dedicated exclusively to the security of medical equipment, organized within the annual Defcon cybersecurity conference, are Dragoș Ionică – Senior Manager in Deloitte Romania and Adrian Dincă – Senior Pentester in Secureworks. The Romanians and their teammates accumulated a total of 10,447 points, 2,000 of which were obtained by identifying critical vulnerabilities in medical equipment from top manufacturers such as Boston Scientific, Illumina and Siemens Healthineers.
Dragoș Ionică and Adrian Dincă distinguished themselves by solving exercises investigating incidents of computer attacks (forensics), reverse engineering on samples of insulin pump malware and encryption of patient data (ransomware).
Invite to organize in 2025 BioHacking Village
I talked to Dragoș Ionică about the experience in Las Vegas. The captain of the team that took first place in the BioHacking Village competition explained that this conference organized in Las Vegas is the ideal place for cybersecurity enthusiasts. In the first part of the conference, a corporate event is held, so that on the last day there will be a competition dedicated to enthusiasts who come from different areas and who, in an organized and very well secured framework, will receive the challenges that await them for a whole year .
The challenges do not only come from the field of biohacking, the one chosen by the Romanians, but the participants can also choose to test the newest models of cars with an autonomous component, or answer some challenges from the aerospace area where manufacturers also come to test their most new software.
The team with which the Romanians participated this year had five members PHOTO: DI personal archive
“These villages are basically huge rooms where the specialists enter and find on various desks all kinds of software, simulators, flight decks and so on. Some things that also have to do with the physical equipment you can test. You can go from village to village if you’re just starting out and you’re curious to see what’s there. (…) It is a very interesting field in which those who develop come and make their products available to be tested from a cyber point of view”explained Dragoș Ionică.
The competition has two components, one of them being the identification of vulnerabilities in the tested equipment, the other aimed at solving some problems available on a dedicated platform. All bring points. If until last year the identification of vulnerabilities brought a much higher score, at this year’s edition the organizers changed the rules, which meant that the Romanians, who discovered the first seven vulnerabilities in just 40 minutes, did not categorically separate themselves from the second place. Even under the new conditions, they collected over 10,400 points and won the competition (as last year), the 1st place earning them the right to be part of the organizing team for the 2025 edition and exclusivity in testing equipment focused on telemedicine.
