Civilian finishes second in top global cyber security competition

In an effort to crack down on hackers and identity theft, especially as electronic payments grow more popular and susceptible to the crime, the United States military recently held a competition to identity the top security experts.

The 2012 Digital Forensics Challenge, hosted by the U.S. Department of Defense's Cyber Crime Center, saw Chris Doman of the United Kingdom finish second overall and as the highest-ranked civilian, The Daily Mail reports.

Doman beat out nearly 2,000 cyber experts from 53 countries, losing only to a team from multibillion-dollar aerospace and defense firm Northrop Grumman, according to the source. Some of the areas addressed in the competition included file signatures, hashing, metadata, data hiding, communication recovery and information concealment.

"This year's DC3 Digital Forensics Challenge saw the highest ever number of players and submissions, and a significant increase in the standard of the competition," Jim Christy, director of future exploration at the Department of Defense's Cyber Crime Unit. "All this makes Chris's achievement [...] beating teams of professionals from some of the largest companies in the world and government's cyber workforces - all the more remarkable.'

As more consumers are user mobile devices to conduct financial transfers and pay bills, the opportunities for hackers to access personal and professional information are only expanding.