News: First place at the WI 2026 Student Challenge: "CyberCampus" wins over the jury

"CyberCampus" wins the WI 2026 Student Challenge

As part of a seminar project under Prof. Dr. Maria Leitner (Chair of AI in IT Security), three students from the University of Regensburg developed “CyberCampus,” a modern web application for planning and conducting cybersecurity simulation exercises. The project was awarded first place at the Student Challenge of the WI 2026 at Johannes Kepler University Linz.

The threat landscape in cyberspace remains tense. Ransomware, supply chain attacks, and increasingly AI-driven phishing campaigns affect companies, government agencies, and critical infrastructure alike. Technical protective measures alone are not enough. What matters is whether processes, responsibilities, and communication channels actually hold up in a real crisis. This is exactly where cyber exercises come in. Only once organizations have tested their response processes under realistic pressure can gaps be identified and closed. In practice, however, running such exercises regularly often fails due to the high organizational effort involved.

Preparing, running, and evaluating simulation exercises digitally

"CyberCampus" addresses this gap by providing end-to-end digital support for the entire exercise cycle. Exercise facilitators can build scenarios in a modular way, assign roles and teams, and control the sequence of events via a timeline. During the exercise, events are injected in a targeted manner, participants' decisions are logged, and the data is prepared for the subsequent evaluation. The debriefing of the exercise is thus based on traceable data rather than on participants' recollections.

From Regensburg to Linz

With this project, the three students applied to the WI 2026 Student Challenge, the international conference on business information systems, which this year was hosted at Johannes Kepler University in Linz. The submission was accepted, and Simon Zintl and Fabio Birner traveled to Linz for the presentation. On site, the team convinced the expert jury both with the content and with the presentation itself. The jury praised the high social and practical relevance of the topic as well as the quality of the technical implementation. In the end, the project took first place in the Student Challenge jury ranking.