Cybersecurity educationCollegiate cyber defense competition advances to regional finals

Seven members of the University of Maine Cyber Defense Team will compete at the annual Northeast Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition at the University of New Hampshire in March. The team was one of nine out of a pool of fourteen schools that qualified for the regional competition.

According to the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition, the competition simulates security operations for a small company. Teams must quickly familiarize themselves with network systems and software before beginning to defend against attacks while also providing customer service to users.

UMaine release reports that computer engineering major Benjamin Grooms will captain UMaine’s team, along with co-captain Kyle Ossinger, a computer science major. The other team members are computer science majors Albano Drazhi and Theodore Farnsworth, mechanical engineering majors Jacob Figg and John Woodill, and electrical engineering major Taylor Newton.

Computer science professor George Markowsky said the range of departments and majors represented on the team show cybersecurity skills could be developed in multiple fields. He says UMaine does not have a formal cybersecurity program, in contrast to nine of the fourteen teams in the qualifying round, and credits assistant coaches Sean Lyford, John Poulin, and Lucas Wood for helping to prepare the team.

The regional competition will be held 14-16 March at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. One winner and one alternate will be selected to represent the Northeast region at the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition in San Antonio, Texas, in April.

Most of the schools that the UMaine team is competing against are NSA National Centers of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance, meaning that they have academic programs specifically tailored to train students in the field of cyber security. UMaine does not have such certification, meaning that much of what the team has learned is self-taught.

“We do a lot of research online,” Grooms told MENAfn. “There are no courses [at UMaine] that deal specifically with cyber security. There are many different courses that you can take knowledge from and apply it.”

Despite this handicap, Grooms feels that the team could do well. “It’s intimidating, but in the past we have done well,” Grooms said.

The other teams that UMaine will compete against in Northeast regionals are:

• Alfred State University
• Champlain College
• Northeastern University
• Rochester Institute of Technology
• SUNY IT
• Syracuse University
• Worcester Polytechnic Institute
• UMass Boston