The The Hackademic Challenges, is an open source project that can be used to test and improve one's knowledge of information system and web application security.

The Hackademic Project has been established in order to support the course Network Security of the Department of Computer Science and Telecommunications of the Technological Educational Institute (TEI) of Larissa. The aim of the Hackademic Project is to introduce the students to the methodologies, the tools and the techniques of black hat hackers. The students are able to perform similar attacks in a controlled, secured virtual environment in order to understand the effectiveness of similar attacks and to learn to implement the proper countermeasures to secure their applications. Responsible for the educational approach of this initiative as well as its academic perspective are Dr. Vasileios Vlachos, Dr Papanikolaou and Dr. Papapanagiotou. The hackademic project is been utilized from various Universities. For further information please contact the academic coordinators of the project.

The Hackademic Challenges implement realistic scenarios with known vulnerabilities in a safe, controllable environment. Users can attempt to discover and exploit these vulnerabilities in order to learn important concepts of information security through the attacker's perspective.

You can choose to start from the challenge that you find most appealing, although we suggest to follow the order presented on the first page. We intend to expand the available challenges with additional scenarios that involve cryptography, and even vulnerable systems implemented in download-able virtual machines.

Even though one can use Hackademic Challenges on one's own, their main purpose is to be used in a live classroom environment. Currently they are successfully used in the security courses of 3 Greek universities.

The Hackademic Challenges project is supported by the OWASP Greek Chapter and are part of the OWASP Academies Project which aims to introduce application security in the academic world and in university curricula.

The Hackademic Challenges is an open source project and as such we would appreciate your suggestions, input or ideas for additional challenges.

The Hackademic Challenges Team:

• Dr. Papanikolaou Alexandros (Technological Educational Institution of Larissa) [ This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ]

• Dr. Papapanagiotou Konstantinos (University of Piraeus) [ This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ]

• Stasinopoulos Anastasios [ This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ]

• Venieris Andreas [ This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ]

• Dr. Vlachos Vasilios (Technological Educational Institution of Larissa) [ This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ]

For more specific information about Hackademic Challenges Project contact with us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Disclaimer: The content of this site is for educational purposes only.

The Hackademic Challenges Team encourages the use of security skills for lawful purposes only.