Over the weekend, Argonne National Laboratory held its first annual collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CDC). The competition was composed of eight collegiate teams from around the midwest.
The objective for each Blue Team (defenders) was to secure a given business network infrastructure (including a mock industrial control system) against the unwarranted attacks of the Red Team (attackers), all while attempting to keep established services running and providing customer assistance for services to the Green Team (users).
On April 23rd, teams arrived early to make any last minute changes to the network. Before the official commencement of the competition, Interim Associate Laboratory Director Todd Combs gave opening remarks and introduced Congressman Bill Foster and Major General Richard J. Hayes, Jr, who spoke about the importance and relevance of cyber security — from how it effects a single person to an entire country and even the world as a whole.
Once the cyber security student competition started, the Red Team began their attack against the infrastructure of the Blue Teams. Collegiate Teams defended their infrastructure from Red Team attacks and ensure that their services remained available for Green Team members, who played the role of the customers. Students not only had to defend their infrastructure, but also had to deal with anomalies. Such anomalies included a Denial of Service (DoS) attack, removing compromised credentials from their systems in a timely manner, and attend a meeting with their “CEO” to discuss the IT security implementation of their company.
One of the main components of the competition was creating detailed instruction within user-friendly documentation to be provided to the Green Team, who took on the role of the customers and would attempt to access the services each team had to provide. Each member of the Green Team would fill out a survey based upon what services were accessible and score according to the readability of the user documentation.
Special congratulations to the top three competitors:
First Place – Team ISEAGE, Iowa State University
Second Place – Team BINAGT, University of Northern Iowa
Third Place – Team UIUC, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Congratulations to all teams who participated in Argonne’s first annual Cyber Defense Competition: