Purdue wins cyber defense competition, advances to Midwest regionals

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — A Purdue University team in the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) placed first in the Midwest Wildcard CCDC, qualifying to compete at the Midwest Regional CCDC on Friday and Saturday (March 13-14).

The team previously earned second place at the Indiana CCDC Qualifier, good enough to advance to the Midwest event, a competition against other second-place teams from Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Missouri and Wisconsin.

“I believe what has made this such a strong team is that it was assembled like a great basketball team. You don’t have five centers, you have players with complimentary, but different, expertise,” said Joel Rasmus, managing director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) in Purdue’s Discovery Park.

“Our team practices together so that they know their individual strengths and those of the rest of their team members. That’s why this team has been sponsored by CERIAS, which was founded 21 years ago to look at issues of cybersecurity from an interdisciplinary perspective.”

The competitions test the eight-person team’s ability to complete a variety of business requests, or injects, on the competition network. While the team carries out enterprise services such as email and an e-commerce site, a team of professional penetration testers launch malicious attacks on the group’s system.

Teams are scored on keeping required services up, controlling and preventing unauthorized access from the professional penetration testers, completing the business tasks and their ability to submit incident reports in response to malicious activity. Regionals will include individuals asking for technical support while using the team’s network. 

“Through competing in other competitions, attending cybersecurity conferences and maintaining relationships with organizations such as CERIAS and the Department of Computer and Information Technology, we are constantly evolving our skills,” said Lucas Hennessy, president and captain of Purdue CCDC.  “We would specifically like to thank professors Robert Deadman and Nicole Hands for their long hours with us.”

Purdue team members are Hennessy of Columbia City, Indiana; Colin Cowie of Washington, D.C.; Brendan Bard of Greenwood, Indiana; George Hamilton of South Bend, Indiana; Van Poole of Central City, Kentucky; Advait Menon of Fetcham, Surrey, U.K.; Ben Sollman of Evansville, Indiana; and Pengyuan (Jeremy) Chen of Shenzhen, China. The faculty advisor is Robert Deadman, clinical assistant professor in computer and information technology.

Writer: Madison Sanneman, msannema@purdue.edu

Source: Joel Rasmus, jrasmus@purdue.edu

Lucas Hennessy, lhenness@purdue.edu