The Kuzbass Express team won the final of the CASE-IN

The final of the XIV season The International Engineering CASE-IN Championship, one of the largest student engineering competitions, has been completed.  The absolute winner in the field of "Electric power Industry" the team of KuzSTU – Kuzbass Express became The band consists of Anastasia Ustyuzhanina, Alexey Alyamkin, Muhammad Kurbanbaev and Yaroslav Avdeev.The students also received recognition in the nominations "Breakthrough Solution" and "Best Video visual aid".

In addition, the team captain, Anastasia Ustyuzhanina, a teacher at the Kemerovo Melnichenko Foundation Talent Center and a graduate student at Kuzbass Polytechnic University, was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the International Engineering CASE-IN Championship. It includes participants who have demonstrated high results, professional growth and significant contribution to the development of the engineering community of the championship for several seasons.

The direction is supervised by JSC "System Operator of the Unified Energy System" and PJSC ROSSETI. In 2026, based on the main theme of the championship "Technologies of the Future", the largest energy companies prepared unique cases for students.

KuzSTU students received a task from PJSC ROSSETI: to develop a 330/110 kV substation protection system against cyber attacks, including DDoS, phishing mailings and malicious software.

*A DDoS attack (Distributed Denial of Service) is a cyberattack in which attackers overload a server, website, service, or network infrastructure with a huge number of requests from multiple devices.

The team has proposed a comprehensive solution that includes several types of protection for each of the "layers": substations, power transmission lines, and the end user of electricity.

For the substation and power transmission line level, the guys used MDM technology, which allows for secure file sharing within the corporate network – only certain employees have access to information. For additional protection of the control center, the students suggested using an HSM, a special physical device that generates and stores access keys to the system.

"We also used SIEM systems to monitor servers and industrial network controllers. Such systems help to quickly detect suspicious activity and prevent possible attacks. To protect against phishing mailings, SEG technology was proposed, and to counter DDoS attacks, an Always On and On Demand hybrid protection system was developed, which allows repelling both constant and sudden cyber attacks," Anastasia Ustyuzhanina said.

For information, the organizers of the CASE-IN championship are the Reliable Change Foundation, the Presidential Platform Russia – the Land of Opportunities, the Non-profit Partnership Youth Forum of Mining Leaders and AstraLogica LLC. The presidential platform "Russia – the Land of Opportunities" was created on the initiative of Russian President Vladimir Putin on May 22, 2018. The mission of the platform is to create the future of Russia, opening equal opportunities for everyone.

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