What is Shakticon?
Inspiring & Empowering Women in CyberSecurity
ShaktiCon is a free global conference focused on inspiring, training, and upskilling women in cybersecurity.
Born out of an understanding that cultural circumstances do not always encourage women to flourish in male dominated fields, ShaktiCon is committed to creating a female focused environment to showcase the range of talented women in cybersecurity.
By doing this we hope to train a new generation of women to be more actively engaged in the field and enter the cybersecurity workforce. ShaktiCon is all about women role models inspiring & encouraging young & aspiring women hackers to attain their goals without any fear.
Why ShaktiCon?
The Industry Needs Women,& also Needs to Open Up For Them.
CyberSecurity as a profession is one where demand is outstripping supply, and based on the technological evolutions and ever-increasing threat landscape, it is expected that there will be triple the number of job openings over the next 5 years, with over 3.5 million new cybersecurity job openings in 2021. Although women represent half the population, and around 48% of the general workforce, the number of women professionals is only about 20% of the total cybersecurity workforce. Of those women, only 1% percent of female cybersecurity workers are in C-suite leadership positions, and this glass ceiling is even higher for women of color. The future of the cybersecurity industry depends on its ability to attract, retain and promote women, who represent a skilled and under-tapped resource.
Safeguarding our lives online requires skills and experiences that lie beyond masculine stereotypes of the hacker and soldier.
Women often don’t see tech or security as viable career paths because they’re often considered masculine professions.
India's First & Only Women CTF Team
Team Shakti
Team Shakti is a group of budding young female minds who have joined together for the cause of bringing about a change in the field of cyber-security. Established as a Capture The Flag team, the team works tirelessly to spread knowledge and make a contribution to balance the prevalent gender gap in the field.
Team Shakti works on the principle of team peer mentoring where the senior members mentor the juniors. Members support and help each other ultimately making the entire team stronger.
Since its foundation in 2019 by Shri Vipin Pavithran, Team Shakti has been recognised to be the only CTF team in India which exclusively comprises female students.
What is our track record?
CyberSecurity at Amrita
Amrita Center for Cybersecurity Systems and Networks has pioneered training of professionals and students and today its ‘bi0s’ team is ranked No. 1 in India and amongst the Top in the world for ethical ranking. Empowering young women in the field of cybersecurity is one of its core objectives deriving inspiration from the Chancellor of Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham - Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi.
team bi0s
India's First & No.1 Ranked CTF Team
team bi0s is the India's No.1 ranked CTF team for 4 years running, and was the first CTF team to formed in India back in 2007. Today, team bi0s is passionate community of over 100 student members, mentored by their seniors, research scholars, alumni and faculty.
InCTF
India's First & Premier CTF Contest
InCTF is an annual Capture The Flag (CTF) event organized by team bi0s, for college students in India in its national editions, and everyone else through its international edition. InCTF was the first CTF event to be held in India when it was started in 2010.
InCTF Jr
India's First & Only CTF Contest for School Students
Amrita InCTF Junior is the first and only national-level CTF contest held exclusively for school students in India. Every year the brightest young hackers from all across India participate in this the learn & hack CTF contest, win exciting prizes & kick-start their cyber-security career.
Our commitment to Women’s Empowerment Runs Deep
Mata Amritanandamayi Devi (Amma)
Amrita holds India’s First Ever UNESCO Chair on Gender Equality & Women EmpowermentView UNESCO Profile
ShaktiCon Organizers
Vipin Pavithran
Vipin Pavithran is an assistant professor at Amrita Center for Cybersecurity Systems and Networks, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham. Prior to joining Amrita he has worked for 10 years in the software industry. Being passionate about helping students to develop their talent and to make them reach their potential, he founded the internationally recognised student clubs - amFOSS, Team bi0s and Team Shakti, and today mentors over 200 engineering students through these clubs to achieve excellence. team bi0s was India's first-ever CTF team when it was formed in 2007, and it was this team that founded the InCTF in 2010, which was the first-ever CTF contest to be organized in India.
Sreepriya Chalakkal
Sreepriya is a Security Analyst at Siemens ProductCERT, where she focuses on vulnerability handling and incident response. Previously she worked as a pentester at Ernw GmbH, Germany, in the mobile security team. She enjoys playing with security challenges in applications, networks and binaries. She is mentor of TeamShakti, a women CTF team from India. Also, core organiser of ShaktiCon, a women only security conference. Also serves as a board member of BlackHoodie. Completed masters from Technical University of Berlin and University of Trento with major Computer Security and Privacy in March 2017.
Sowmya Ravidas
Sowmya Ravidas is pursuing her PhD in the Security Group at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. Her research interests include various aspects of access control in the domain of IoT. In particular, her works focus on understanding attribute retrieval in Attribute-based access control (ABAC) and developing fine grained access control frameworks for distributed architectures such as IoT. Previously she has also worked on cloud security and NFV.
Prior to joining TU Eindhoven, she received her master's degree in 'Mobile Computing- Security and Services' from Aalto University in Finland. She also worked with Nokia Bell Labs for a year as a Master Thesis Student and as a research assistant at Aalto University. She received her bachelor degree in 'Computer Science and Engineering' from Amrita University, India.
Savita Seetaraman
Savita will soon start as a DevOps Engineer at Taxy.io. Previously she worked at Ericsson as a Cloud Open Source Developer. She was a Google Women TechMaker in the year 2016 - 2017.
She did her Masters in Computer Science with a specialization in Security and Privacy and Innovation and Entrepreneurship, from EIT Digital Master School. She completed her Masters thesis in SAP SE, Germany. She received her bachelor degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Amrita University, India.
Surya Seetharaman
Surya Seetharaman is a Software Engineer working at RedHat, Berlin on Cloud Networking. She is an avid advocate of OpenSource and OpenInfra. Prior to working at RedHat, she was working at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland on cloud technologies. She holds a Masters' degree in Networked Services and Systems from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden and her bachelor degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Amrita University, India.
Student Organizers
Ashwin Shenoy
Swathi Kasikala
Shruti Dixit
Geethna T K
Ashwathi Sasi
Sowmya Potluri
Ayushi Sharma
Nimisha Dughyala
Sandra Bino
Meenakshi S L
Simran Kathpalia
Namitha S
