Students Participating in Cyber Defense Event

This weekend, students from the UWT's Institute of Technology will be participating in the 2nd Annual Pacific Rim Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition on the Microsoft campus.

Members of the student organization, the Grey Hat Group, will be presented with a preconfigured systems of a fictitious company that they are tasked to operate. Then, as described by the competition's web site.

The evil red team, which sits next door, however, will attempt to vandalize and break into this network. The student teams need to defend against the attacks of this red team. In particular, the goals for each team are to:

• fulfill assigned business tasks (so-called injects)
• keep services operational
• prevent break-ins by the red team

Students are scored based on the goals above. The team with the most points of the two day event will be the winner of the Pacific Rim Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition and will proceed to the National competition.

Justin Carton, the Grey Hat Group president, has been working the group through practice sessions to get them all prepared. However, a former founder of the GHG and alumni to the program here at the Institute, Mary Jane Kelly, will be part of the "evil red team". She and another alumni John Hernandez, both from Casaba Security, will be tough to handle.

The Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity, the University of Washington and Microsoft are helping to put on the event. You have undoubtedly heard of the last two but perhaps not the first. The CIAC is a Pacific Northwest research, education, industry and government community that provides innovation and leadership in the protection of critical public and private information infrastructure, and provides well educated information assurance and cybersecurity at all professional levels.

Guest Author: Andrew Fry, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma. Good luck to all.