Alexandria Technical and Community College Students Win 2021 CCDC
On Saturday, February 6, 2021 the Minnesota State I.T. Center of Excellence hosted the Minnesota State Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC). The competition is a full day of competition and learning and over 100 students from 8 different Minnesota State System institutions from across the state participated. This years event was moved online thanks to the pandemic.
The event itself consists of a live, controlled virtual environment where CCDC competitors assume administrative and protective duties for an existing “commercial” network – typically a small company with 50+ users, 7 to 10 servers, and common Internet services such as a web server, mail server, and e-commerce site. Each team begins the competition with an identical set of hardware and software and is scored on their ability to detect and respond to outside threats, maintain availability of existing services such as mail servers and web servers, respond to business requests such as the addition or removal of additional services, and balance security needs against business needs.
Throughout the competition an automated scoring engine is used to verify the functionality and availability of each team’s services on a periodic basis and traffic generators continuously feed simulated user traffic into the competition network. A volunteer Red Team (Ethical Hackers) provides the “external threat” of all Internet-based services which allows the teams to match their defensive skills against live opponents (hackers).
CONGRATS TO ALL WINNERS!!!
The competition was tight this year with the top five (5) teams all within 300 points (out of 28,000).
1st Place – Alexandria Technical and Community College, Alexandria, MN
Winners of the Minnesota CCDC advance to Regional CCDC (https://www.cssia.org/mwccdc/) hosted by Moraine Valley Community College in Illinois with a chance to compete at the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition At Texas San Antonio, Texas in April, 2021. (https://www.nationalccdc.org/index.php) This year all events are held remotely due to the Pandemic.
2nd Place – Metropolitan State University, St. Paul, MN
3rd Place – Lake Superior College, Duluth, MN
4th Place – Minneapolis Community and Technical College, Minneapolis, MN
Other Participating Teams: Hennepin Technical College, (Brooklyn Park), Minnesota State Community and Technical College (Moorhead), Minnesota State University, Mankato (Mankato), and St. Cloud State University (St. Cloud).
Alexandria Technical and Community College will automatically move on to the Regional CCDC the end of March 2021 and 2nd Place Metropolitan State University will complete in the Midwest Wildcard for an additional chance to move on to the Regional as well.
A huge thank you to the support team!
For more information or to set up time to speak with students, faculty advisors, or leaders of this event please contact Janice Aanenson at Janice.aanenson@metrostate.edu