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Student Team Successfully Defends Cyber Attacks, Wins Indiana Competition
February 22, 2012
Six of Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology's top tech-savvy
students defended a business network infrastructure against
professional "hackers" to earn first-place honors in the Indiana's
Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition on February 18. In its
first year of participating, the team will progress to compete in
the Midwest Regional competition in Chicago and possibly the
national finals in San Antonio, Texas.
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Cyber Security Champions: Earning first-place honors in
Indiana's Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition was the team that
included (front row, from left) faculty mentor Chris Simmons, Neil
Semmel, Sean Richardson and faculty mentor Nadine
Shillingford. In the back row (from left) are Mark Wlodarski,
Cameron Spry and Ryne Bell. Not pictured is Parker
Schmitt.
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The Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) provides a
controlled, competitive environment to assess students'
understanding and operational competency in managing the challenges
inherent in protecting a corporate network infrastructure and
business information systems.
The challenge for the Indiana competition had the Rose-Hulman
team setting up a mock small-business network with web servers,
email servers and e-commerce operation servers. The students
worked together to fend off attacks from a team of security
professional "hackers." Each team had a network consisting of
six servers, three workstations, one firewall, one router and one
switch. The network was mixed with Windows, Linux and Cisco
devices. During the competition, points were awarded based on
how well the students maintained and defended their services.
Concepts that a CCDC team needs to learn in order to perform
well include perimeter security, patching, networking, UNIX and
Windows user management, services and applications, tools (port
scanners, vulnerability scanners etc.), authentication and other
general administrative duties. In addition, students learn
key life skills including time management, delegation, good writing
skills, organizational skills and flexibility.
"The competition deals with many pressing issues that real
security and network professionals deal with and they pass along
these scenarios for us to overcome under pressure," stated
Rose-Hulman team captain Sean Richardson, a junior computer
engineering major.
Other team members were computer science and software
engineering students software engineering majors Ryne Bell and Neil
Semmel, engineering physics major Parker Schmitt, computer
engineering student Cameron Spry and computer science major Mark
Wlodarski. Faculty mentors were Nadine Shillingford and Chris
Simmons of the Department of Computer Science and Software
Engineering.
Rose-Hulman's team outscored four other Indiana colleges in the
state competition at Fort Wayne. Indiana Institute of
Technology placed second and Ivy Tech Community College Northeast
was third. This was the first year that all of the
participating teams came from Indiana. All of the other
competing teams had eight students, while Rose-Hulman's squad had
six members.
Learn more about the CCDC at www.nationalccdc.org.