The U.S. cyber team's head coach, retired U.S. Army Special Forces Lt. Col. TJ O'Connor, noted the unique platform presented by cybersecurity competitions. Unlike other forms of computer science education, O'Connor said, staying up to date on the latest developments in cybersecurity is difficult, with hackers constantly iterating on and developing new tactics to break through cyberdefenses. it would still be hard to simulate being in the thick of such an operation, .

Last year, Microsoft Corp.'s Azure security team detected suspicious activity in the cloud computing usage of a large retailer: One of the company's administrators, who usually logs on from New York, was trying to gain entry from Romania. A hacker had broken in. Microsoft quickly alerted its customer, and the attack was foiled before the intruder got too far. Inc. and various startups are moving away from solely using older "rules-based" technology designed to respond to specific kinds of intrusion and deploying machine-learning algorithms that crunch massive amounts of data on logins, behavior and previous attacks to ferret out and stop hackers. "Machine learning is a very powerful technique for security--it's dynamic, while rules-based systems are very rigid," says Dawn Song, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley's Artificial Intelligence Research Lab. "It's a very manual intensive process to change them, whereas machine learning is automated, dynamic and you can retrain it easily."

Last year, Microsoft Corp.'s Azure security team detected suspicious activity in the cloud computing usage of a large retailer: One of the company's administrators, who usually logs on from New York, was trying to gain entry from Romania. A hacker had broken in. Microsoft quickly alerted its customer, and the attack was foiled before the intruder got too far. Inc. and various startups are moving away from solely using older "rules-based" technology designed to respond to specific kinds of intrusion and deploying machine-learning algorithms that crunch massive amounts of data on logins, behavior and previous attacks to ferret out and stop hackers. "Machine learning is a very powerful technique for security--it's dynamic, while rules-based systems are very rigid," says Dawn Song, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley's Artificial Intelligence Research Lab. "It's a very manual intensive process to change them, whereas machine learning is automated, dynamic and you can retrain it easily."

Last year, Microsoft Corp.'s Azure security team detected suspicious activity in the cloud computing usage of a large retailer: One of the company's administrators, who usually logs on from New York, was trying to gain entry from Romania. A hacker had broken in. Microsoft quickly alerted its customer, and the attack was foiled before the intruder got too far. Inc. and various startups are moving away from solely using older "rules-based" technology designed to respond to specific kinds of intrusion and deploying machine-learning algorithms that crunch massive amounts of data on logins, behavior and previous attacks to ferret out and stop hackers. "Machine learning is a very powerful technique for security--it's dynamic, while rules-based systems are very rigid," says Dawn Song, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley's Artificial Intelligence Research Lab. "It's a very manual intensive process to change them, whereas machine learning is automated, dynamic and you can retrain it easily."

Esports have already reached the mainstream, and as Blizzard attempt to push their reach even further with Overwatch League, they've been trying to leave the wild west attitude of earlier competitive gaming efforts behind. Yet since the League began, we've been asking why they haven't published their rules and code of conduct, so that we have transparency on what's expected of teams and players. Now they've finally made those guidelines public - at least partially. Check out Overwatch patch 1.20....

Every year cyber attacks are becoming more sophisticated and frequent -- and it's predicted they'll cost the world $8 trillion by 2022. But a company founded by mathematicians and ex-spies is trying to change the way organizations protect themselves from hackers. British cyber security firm Darktrace is using artificial intelligence to create a "cyber immune system." Usually, companies try to anticipate what an attack would look like and ask their computers to look for anomalies that match that description. But Darktrace says it has come up with a system that learns what is normal behavior within a company's network, and can then make intelligent judgments to spot emerging threats -- even if it experiences a new, complex attack that it's never seen before.

CERN's Large Hadron Collider is an information powerhouse. In 2017, it's expected to generate 50 million gigabytes of data on a shared network of over 8,000 physicists. But all that information makes the collider a prime target for hackers. It was first hacked within days of becoming operational, and CERN's computer security officer told Motherboard its grid is under permanent attack from "everybody." Hackers could want access to the grid for many reasons, including mining bitcoins, distributing malware and stealing valuable user information.