Jacopo Di Pumpo, 17, gold medal winner in ethical hacking
From an app built at the age of twelve by connecting two phones with an audio cable to a gold medal in Italy's most important cybersecurity competition. This is the brilliant story of Jacopo Di Pumpo, born in 2007, a student at the Marie Curie high school in Cernusco sul Naviglio (Milan) and now the youngest member of Team Italy, the Italian national cyber defence team. His name is among the overall winners of the 2025 edition of the Italian Cybersecurity Olympics (OlyCyber.IT), on the podium alongside Leonardo Mattei (Labriola Scientific High School in Rome), Alan Davide Bovo (Cesena) and Stefano Perrucci (Francavilla Fontana), under the guidance of the Cybersecurity National Lab team of the National Interuniversity Consortium for Informatics (Cini). But Jacopo did not stop there: last June, he was among the four Italian students awarded at the International Cybersecurity Olympics in Singapore, a highly competitive event that saw Italy stand out among the best teams globally.
This success crowns a journey that began by chance, between games and curiosity, but was nurtured by patience, independent study and creativity. As Jacopo himself tells blogger Nicoletta Vulpetti in an article published on the Job Digital Lab blog, it was his aunt who enrolled him in a competition called Coolest Projects for fun. From there, it was a climb made up of attempts, mistakes and passion: ‘If you try and try again, something happens,’ he says with disarming clarity. From projects with his friends at the parish youth club, the Kotekorbya group, to the founding of a small self-produced hosting service, Jacopo has always maintained a key principle: to do things that are high quality, simple and reliable, and that can improve the lives of others.
On 8 May, Jacopo was one of the protagonists of Supereroi digitali (Digital Superheroes), the ethical hacking challenge promoted by the Fondazione Mondo Digitale as part of RomeCup 2025, organised with the Job Digital Lab project and reported by Rai News in a special interview with three young digital champions.
Jacopo told journalist Francesco Laurenti about his first international experience, explaining how he joined Team Italy, the Italian national cyber defence team, thanks to his initial success in the web category at the Italian Cybersecurity Olympics. After two years of training, he was finally selected to participate in the European Cybersecurity Challenge held in Turin.
‘On the first day, we faced the classic Jeopardy challenges, but the second day was even more interesting: an attack and defence challenge, in which we had to defend Italy's servers and attack those of other countries. There were 50 teams from all over Europe, plus guests from Canada and Australia. It was much more fun: it requires coordination, teamwork and even a little creativity. For me, it was a decisive experience.’
Together with Leonardo Mattei and Kristjan Tarantelli, Jacopo reflected on the new challenges of cybersecurity and the importance of cultivating ethical as well as technical skills. ‘I'm fascinated by logical flaws, not just technical bugs. I want to get inside the mind of the person who wrote the code, understand where they went wrong,’ he explains with the enthusiasm of someone who knows they are at the beginning of a long journey.
In the world of IT, where talent often emerges outside formal educational pathways, Jacopo is living proof that curiosity and initiative can make all the difference. His goal? To work in IT security, perhaps setting up his own company, but always with a greater purpose: sharing knowledge to multiply opportunities.
As he himself says: ‘When knowledge is shared, it increases for everyone.’
