This August, a motley assortment of approximately 30,000 attendees, including some of the best cybersecurity professionals, expert programmers and officials from top government agencies packed the Las Vegas Convention Center for DEF CON, the world’s largest hacker convention.

At the convention, a cybersecurity cohort of professors, researchers and graduate students from Arizona State University waited anxiously in a crowded ballroom for the results of the semifinal round of the DARPA AI Cyber Challenge, also known as AIxCC.

The 25-person Shellphish team, comprised of ‘hackademics’ from ASU, the University of California, Santa Barbara and Purdue University had been preparing for this day since March. They now waited on the edges of their seats for the answer to a burning question. Would they receive the $2 million in prize money that would enable them to continue their work?

The AIxCC is a competition hosted at DEF CON by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, to spur the development of a cybersecurity system powered by artificial intelligence, or AI. Because of its desire to protect hospitals, pharmacies and medical devices from cyberattacks, the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, is also collaborating on the competition and has expanded the prize pool.

In the semifinals, $14 million were on the line. But the true stakes are even higher. The work is part of the U.S. government’s vital efforts to shore up national cybersecurity defense.

A massive cybersecurity workforce shortage, vulnerabilities in open-source software and a drastic rise in cybercrime have created a desperate need for solutions that can be deployed now to protect the nation’s technical infrastructure.

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