The UW Team Captured First Place

March 21, 2011 — A team of eight representatives from the University of Wyoming competed in the North Central Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) on February 26, 2011. The competition was held at Dakota State University in Madison, South Dakota. After eight grueling hours of competition, the UW team captured first place.

Eric Richardson, Tom Marnell, Nick Anderson, Jeff Burroughs, Frank Zebre, Jay Wuensch, Dietrich Wambach, and Brandon Skari

The competition challenges teams on their understanding and execution of computer system and networking administration as well as their ability to secure these systems from network based attackers. The teams are placed in a company IT environment and asked to keep a handful of computer systems and services up and running. Many of these systems and services were "broken" before the competition began. Getting the systems and services up and running is only part of the challenge, because at the same time a team of attackers are actively trying to break into a team's network and cause even more damage. Teams must be able to secure their network from these attacks. Another part of the competition includes periodic challenges called injects. These inject challenges test team members over a wide range of system administrator tasks. Each inject response must be completed in a certain amount of time. Teams are scored on how well they keep and defend their services, and on their ability to complete their inject challenges.

This regional win qualifies the UW CCDC team for the national competition. At nationals, the UW team will face seven other Universities from around the country. The event brings big sponsors and promises to be a big opportunity for competitors. The national competition will be held April 8-10, in San Antonio Texas. The University of Wyoming's CCDC team is comprised of Brandon Skari, Nick Anderson, Dietrich Wambach, Jay Wuensch, Tom Marnell, Frank Zebre, Eric Richardson, and Jeff Burroughs.

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