OSU students excel at Collegiate Cyber Defense challenge
Monday, April 25, 2011
OSU’s team consisted of Andrew Fagan, Tahsin Rahmah, Kyle Beverly, Tyler Bell, Jared Bryngelson, Logan Lynn, Nathan Elendt, Patrick Storm and Robb Wise. Though it was only the second year an OSU team has participated in the event, they placed fourth in the competition.
“I am really proud of our students,” said Jim Burkman, visiting assistant professor of management science and information systems. “This is a really intense, really hard-core competition, and the students really stepped up and took the initiative this year.”
The contest gives teams the opportunity to act as network managers for a simulated business. The students monitor and protect their team’s server against hackers and other external threats, and they are scored on how long they can keep the program operating while simultaneously responding to normal service requests.
The competition is grueling, taking up three 12-hour days. Prior to the competition, the students have no knowledge of the network they must protect, nor can they bring external software into the competition. To add to the challenge, the students must try to protect their network from expert hackers. This year the competition brought in industry professionals from the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Air Force.
“I would say this was one of the coolest things I’ve done,” Elendt said. “It felt awesome. The competition consists of a lot of ups and downs, from the initial rush of getting access to our servers and the calm of having everything working to the entirely different sort of rush of finding an intrusion and trying to sort it out. For it being only our second year to attend, I think we did extremely well.”
Burkman said the team prepared the competition with virtually no outside help. They met every week for months, practicing and working to perfect their skills.
“Even though the team did have great departmental support, they were very proactive,” Burkman said. “The team’s successful showing is made all the more impressive because some schools offer courses specifically to prepare for this competition, whereas our students planned and executed their training on their own time and initiative.”
OSU’s team was sponsored by OSU’s Department of Management Science and Information Systems, OSU’s Information Security and Assurance Club, and the Center for Telecommunications and Network Security. For more information, visit http://isac.okstate.edu.