UNT Competes at 2009 CCDC

Back row, (L-R): Paul Sroufe, Prudhvi Surapaneni, Daniel Piers Front row, (L-R): Dr. Philip Sweany, Blake Eakin, Angel Fox, Matt Bisho
Posted: 
Thursday, April 2, 2009

The 2009 Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition was held at Texas A&M College Station this year. It is a three day competition whereby teams defend various software and hardware against a RED TEAM attack. This year UNT brought a team of six people, two graduates and four undergraduates to participate. There were eight teams total at Texas A&M this year.

The UNT team was Angel Fox, Paul Sroufe, Prudhvi Surapaneni, Daniel Piers, Dr. Philip Sweany, Blake Eakin and Matt Bishop. This year's competition was made much more interesting by an innovative "Online Store" where the teams can purchase materials and equipment. Teams were then tasked with contracts that they could accept and make "money" to spend at this store. The store included servers, workstations, Cisco firewalls, and cables for everything.

Teams were assigned to identical rooms. Each room had eight computers/servers that were configured to run a variety of services. Some of the computers were already compromised, others were running pirated software, and all of them were out of date, patchwise. Each team then had to begin the arduous task of finding the password to each computer, securing it, and keeping those services online despite an onslaught red team assaults. The competition is recommended for anyone wanting to further their experience in information security.