News & Events
Towson University Students Win Mid-Atlantic Cyber Defense
Competition
(03/17/2010)
The Towson University student team has just won the mid-Atlantic
Regional Cyber-Defense Competition, and will now be competing in
the National Final, to be held in San Antonio from April 16-18.
The mid-Atlantic
region consists of the states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey,
Delaware, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and the District of
Columbia. Fifteen institutions participated in the initial round
of the competition, including:
George Mason,
George Washington, James Madison, UMBC,
University of MD
College Park, University of Pittsburgh, Wilmington
University
Five teams,
including Towson made it to the regional finals. The Regional
Final lasted three days (Thursday 3/11 - Saturday 3/13). During
the final, each of the student teams had to run and maintain the
IT infrastructure of the fictional town of Avalon. They had to run
and support a range of technologies including email, multiple web
sites, multiple databases, a SharePoint site, an Open Conference
System, instant messaging, and a disaster management system.
The students had
to do so while under constant attack from a "Red Team." The Red
Team, which eventually numbered over 20, consisted of a mix of
professional penetration testers and students of offensive network
warfare. This team attempted to attack the systems that the
students were maintaining in a variety of ways, from network
attacks to wireless attacks to hacking the RFID system that was
used to control the door to the student work area up to the
surreptitious use of microphones and camera equipment aimed at the
student teams.
While this was
going on, the students were given "business injects" that would
require them to complete various tasks. As an example, the
students were told that a (fictional) earthquake had damaged one
of their servers which had to be replaced during the competition.
To win the
competition, the student teams needed to keep their systems up and
running, keep the Red Team hackers out of their systems and
simultaneously respond to all of the business injects over the
course of the competition- over two full days of attacks (Friday &
Saturday).
The competition
was run at the conference center at the new SAIC facility in
Columbia. Other corporate sponsors included Boeing, Northrop
Grumman, CSC, Cisco, Tenable, Core Security Technologies, White
Wolf Security, and Solera.
Thursday evening
the students were treated to a tour of the cyber security
operations center for Northrop Grumman, which is housed in their
facility in Annapolis Junction. Students were also treated to an
array of speakers, including:
·
Randy Georgieff (Department of
Defense Cyber Crime Center)
·
Alan Greenberg (Boeing)
·
Marcus Ranum (Tenable)
·
Paul Turczynski (Boeing)
Some of the media
describing the competition includes:
There were two
camera crews on site during the competition, one to develop a
documentary for the organizer while a second was hired by Solera.
Solera was providing the competition with some of their enterprise
level data capture products to allow staff and visitors to see
what was happening on the network, and their film crew was there
to get footage that can be used in their promotional activities.
Interestingly, the primary Solera representative was Finn Ramsland-
the (now very proud) father of one of the members of the Towson
student team.
The Towson team
consisted of :
·
Madeline Pelkey, Junior (Team
Captain)
·
Brian Haar, Graduate Student
·
Shane Lester, Senior
·
Felix A. Mercado, Graduate
Student
·
Brian Namovicz, Senior
·
Finn Ramsland, Senior
·
Bryan Sizemore, Senior
·
Jon Wiseman, Senior
The initial round
of this year’s mid-Atlantic Cyber Defense competition was a three
hour session done remotely- though it had to be postponed twice
due to the snow storms. After the team made it to the finals,
student preparation activities increased again, including an
all-day session held on the Saturday before the competition in the
computer security classroom laboratory.
The Center for
Applied Information Technology actively supported the student
teams, including providing the team's registration fee, hosting
the team for the first round of the competition, and providing the
team with equipment (firewalls and Cisco phones) that they used
for practice in advance of the competition.
The web site for
the National Cyber Defense Competition:
http://www.nationalccdc.org/
The web site for
the mid-Atlantic Regional Competition:
http://www.midatlanticccdc.org/CCDC/
|
