Bunkered down in rooms across the nation, 43 teams of students spent 24 busy hours hacking IT systems non-stop this week.

Their challenge? To uncover flaws in a fictitious company's IT systems.

Hacker

Telstra, along with other government agencies, held their "2013 Cyber Security Challenge" on Tuesday and Wednesday to try to uncover Australia's next top IT security minds. The students' mission was to find the most flaws in the fictitious company's IT systems in 24 hours.

Groups of four students from 20 universities and TAFE colleges across Australia participated and Telstra said the competition proved so popular that it had to cap the number of teams per institution to three.