07 Feb 2013
Staff Writer
Areli Chavez
Intern
A small group of seven students will represent UNT at the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition Saturday Feb. 9 at the regional level for the first time.
“I love learning about new things,” team member and computer science junior Santiago Serrato said.
Although this is the first time that the team made it to regionals, UNT has been involved in CCDC before, and hosted the regional competition in 2007.
“UNT has competed many times before,” computer science and engineering professor Ram Dantu said. “This year we have more grad students participating.”
The event consists of competing in various business and technical tasks, called “injects.” Teams are expected to keep services running and available while keeping attackers out.
“An inject that makes me laugh is an email from the CEO asking to help his nephew with his computer security class,” computer science master’s student Yernat Yestekov said.
Several teams compete at regionals.
The gold team consists of the competition administration. This team is responsible for organizing the competition, injecting business process events, and handling challenges.
The white team serves as the room judges that observe and evaluate the team performance. The team consists of security academics from other competing universities.
The red team periodically probes, scans and attempts to penetrate the blue team networks by simulating external hackers attempting to get unauthorized access. This team is formed by unbiased information security professionals from several computer organizations.
The blue team is the group formed by each of the competing schools.
“I hope we will be able to make the transition to next year’s team and share our experience with them,” Yestekov said.
Saturday’s regional competition will include teams from the entire Southwest, with Texas A&M College Station as the biggest competitor with a long history of wins.
“We are focused on getting the first place at regionals and hopefully win nationals,” Yestekov said.
