Category | News

Team places third in real-life Internet battle

Published on March 11, 2008 by The Sentinel

    KSU students are better prepared to keep networks safe from
intruders after placing third among six teams in the 2008 Collegiate
Cyber Defense Competition last weekend on campus.

    The University of Louisville won first place and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte won second place in a competition where students were challenged to keep their networks operational and defend themselves from the relentless attacks of industry experts.

    The KSU-hosted, two-day competition was held in the Student Center and was open to Information Security and Information Security and Assurance students who enrolled in an upper level class designed to prepare them for the competition.  Members of the class voted on whomever they thought would be best in the competition.

    The realistic attacks on the networks were managed by experts from IBM and Pricewaterhouse Coopers – companies who are hired by corporations to test their network viability and internet security.  Students gained real-world experience in dealing with intruders and defending information on their network from companies that specialize in testing every aspect of network security. 

    “The competition was very good preparation for what they will face in the real world as information security professionals,” said Richard Austin, part-time Computer Information Systems instructor.  “The two days of competition was a very intense exposure for students.  It took what they might face in a month on the job and crammed it into two days.”

    According to Austin, all the teams performed well in the competition, which made it difficult to choose a winner.  Each team was graded in three areas: how well they responded to the normal requests of Web site users, how well they kept network services up during the competition, and how successful each team was in defending themselves from the attacks.

    Each team functioned as a division of the fictional company Hal.com.  Adjunct Professor Andy Green played the role of the chief information officer of the company.  Green’s job was to misconfigure and set up a terribly secured network that the students would be given, then approve or deny requests by students based on the reasoning of their requests.  Green said the requests were likely to get approved if they could show how it related to securing the network.

    The students came in to the competition under the premise that Hal.com had to fire the last security team because they were terribly incompetent.  The Saturday session was free from attacks and allowed students to reconfigure the networks and figure out what components of the network needed to be replaced.

    On Saturday, the first day of the competition, students had to repair a poorly managed network that consisted of many flaws and make needed changes before the bombardment of attacks on Sunday.  For 12 hours on Sunday, students fought to maintain the operational status of their networks from the onslaught of attacks, while defending their information and processing requests made by users on the Web site, such as email and business operation.

    “Every team took a hit throughout the day and they worked hard to get data back up,” Green said.  “Even if they weren’t successful they didn’t give up.”

    The winning team from the University of Louisville will continue on to the national competition in San Antonio, Texas April 18-20.