This year I had the honor of competing on the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) team for RIT. For those of you unfamiliar with the CCDC it is the largest collegiate cyber security competition in the entire country. Over 180 schools competed in qualifying competitions, 10 from each of the 10 regions competed and the winner from each region had the chance to compete in the National CCDC for the Alamo Cup. The competition consists of three main teams: blue, red, and white. The blue teams are teams of eight students from a school that try to secure and defend systems they are given during the competition. The systems they are given have critical services to maintain such as email or DNS and also are bullet ridden with security flaws. At the same time they are also responsible for injects, or business tasks such as set up a VPN or central logging. The red team is a group of security professionals that try to hack into the blue teams' systems and disrupt their services. Blue teams are responsible for detecting and reporting red team activity in the form of incident response reports. The white team is the team that sets up the competition, designs the systems that are used in the competition, and monitor teams as they defend their networks and complete injects. Qualifying events are usually around 8 hours long, regionals are usually two or three days, and finally nationals consists of two days.
For the past couple of years RIT has won the North East Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (NECCDC) and gone onto nationals. This year was no exception. I would go into more detail about that but this post is mainly focussed on nationals. Last year was the same, except the team won the national championship, so the team this year had quite a name to live up to.
Over the past few months I have gotten to know each and every one of my team members. They are honestly some of the smartest and most driven people I have ever met. We practiced and competed for months before the Raytheon National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (RNCCDC) of this year in San Antonio, Texas.
Our time practicing involved studying multiple OSs, securing them, learning to run services on them, detecting and stopping attacks, and preparing for the worst. Having heard all about the competition from members of the team that were there last year I was both nervous and excited.
We had no idea what we were in for...
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