2008 Woodie Awards
Cyber Defense Team hones skills
Aubrey Fenton
Issue date: 2/12/07 Section: Science & Technology
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Washtenaw Community College's cyber defense team will be participating in the Michigan/Ohio Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition on Feb. 16-18. The event will be hosted at Eastern Michigan University, and is the first collegiate cyber defense competition for the states of Michigan and Ohio.
The competition involves seven schools, including WCC. Each team will have eight students who will build a network that supplies specified services and simultaneously defend it from professional hackers brought in for the competition from the Cyber Adversary Research Center.
The team has been preparing for months. Last November the team visited West Point Military Academy in New York for a day of cyber training. This not only educated the team more on cyber defense, but it also allowed the team to get to know each other better, said James Lewis, the competition director.
The team has also been preparing for the upcoming event by repeatedly building the network that the contest requires them to construct and ultimately defend. Prior to and during the building up of the network, all teams must defend their network from the professional hackers. To prepare for this aspect of the competition the team has been trying to break into the network they have built. Doing this allows the team to prepare defenses against the vulnerabilities they find, thus decreasing the chance that hackers will break in through that specific weak spot.
"I think the team's come together really well. The closer we get, the more refined they become," said Lewis. "These guys can build a fully functional network from scratch, configure... and test it in less than five hours, and if hacked, recover in a matter of minutes."
This competition is already much different from others of its kind. Not only because of requirements to build a network, as opposed to other competitions that have a network set up prior to the event that students defend, but also because the rules are different. The rules to be used at this competition have been established under international standards and have been approved in four other countries, said Lewis.
The competition involves seven schools, including WCC. Each team will have eight students who will build a network that supplies specified services and simultaneously defend it from professional hackers brought in for the competition from the Cyber Adversary Research Center.
The team has been preparing for months. Last November the team visited West Point Military Academy in New York for a day of cyber training. This not only educated the team more on cyber defense, but it also allowed the team to get to know each other better, said James Lewis, the competition director.
The team has also been preparing for the upcoming event by repeatedly building the network that the contest requires them to construct and ultimately defend. Prior to and during the building up of the network, all teams must defend their network from the professional hackers. To prepare for this aspect of the competition the team has been trying to break into the network they have built. Doing this allows the team to prepare defenses against the vulnerabilities they find, thus decreasing the chance that hackers will break in through that specific weak spot.
"I think the team's come together really well. The closer we get, the more refined they become," said Lewis. "These guys can build a fully functional network from scratch, configure... and test it in less than five hours, and if hacked, recover in a matter of minutes."
This competition is already much different from others of its kind. Not only because of requirements to build a network, as opposed to other competitions that have a network set up prior to the event that students defend, but also because the rules are different. The rules to be used at this competition have been established under international standards and have been approved in four other countries, said Lewis.
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