TU students to compete at MACCDC mid-Atlantic regional final competition

The team of nine students will compete against seven other teams to see which can best fend off an attack by a team of cybersecurity professionals posing as hackers.

By Megan Bradshaw on March 26, 2017

With allegations of Russians hacking the 2016 United States Presidential election and security breaches at multinational companies like Yahoo! and Target, cybersecurity continues to be a hot topic, and learning cyberdefense skills remains particularly relevant. 

Towson University’s cyber defense team comprised of Katherine Bridenstine ’18, Jarrett Booz ’18, Joshua McGiff ’18, Janusz Pazgier ’18, Brian Leschke ’17, Samantha Frederick ’17, Alex Goldberg ’20, Anthony DeCarlo ’18, and Albert Jennette ’17 will participate in the Mid-Atlantic Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (MACCDC) regional finals March 30 through April 1 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

TU will face competition not only from Delaware Technical Community College, Drexel University, Frederick Community College, Liberty University, University of Maryland College Park, UMBC and Wilmington University, but also cybersecurity professionals on the Red Team, posing as hackers.

According to the MACCDC competition scenario, the TU team is one of eight brought in by fictional company “We-B-Smart,” which has experienced several intrusions over the last several months, allegedly by a rival company, that have damaged their reputation. 

Each team will be responsible for defending and managing their resources. In addition, the teams will be called upon to assist in application development and will report directly to We-B-Smart’s CEO.

Read the full scenario

The team that does the best job preventing further attacks, managing IT resources and assisting with the development of applications will advance to the MACCDC finals in San Antonio, Texas.