SRA Team Competes in Collegiate Cyber Defense Competion

Thursday, February 23, 2012 - 666 hits

Penn State Altoona Security and Risk Analysis (SRA) degree students will be participating in the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC: www.nationalccdc.org) March 2 through 4, 2012, with the assistance of their faculty advisor, Jungwoo Ryoo. In 2011, SRA students competed in the CCDC for the first time and ranked fourth out of the eight teams that participated in the At Large Regional Competition.

Each team in the CCDC event is given a set of IT resources (e.g., servers, workstations, and networks) and then charged with defending those resources while maintaining critical business services (e.g., a functioning and uncompromised web server). During the event, the red team will actively attempt to compromise each team's resources, and the white team will periodically give each team a business task to complete (known as an "inject"). All IT resources for the competition will be on virtual machines and therefore remotely available to the team, which will be competing in the Hawthorn Building on campus.

The winner of the At Large Regional Competition receives a free trip to the 2012 Deloitte National CCDC event in San Antonio, Texas. For the At Large Regional Competition, a judge is sent to each team, who is responsible for distributing tasks and grading them. This year, Mark Bienz from the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Atlantic in Washington, D.C., volunteered to serve as a white team member for the Penn State Altoona SRA team.

Bienz is the head of the Advanced Cyber Concepts Division, Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, Atlantic Command. With more than thirty years of combined military and civilian service, he operated for the past fifteen years within a fee-for-service construct under Navy working capital guidelines helping a wide range of Navy, Department of Defense, and non-Department of Defense government agencies achieve their information technology objectives.

Bienz will give a talk to Penn State Altoona SRA students on Friday, March 2, at 9:25 a.m. in room 259 of the Hawthorn Building. Non-SRA major students are welcome to attend the talk.