Two teams from the Anderson University Center for Cybersecurity placed high in the NCL Games, the National Cyber League’s Spring 2022 competition.
According to cybersecurity instructor Brandon Grech, the established team, root@au, placed in the top 14 percent of teams—placing 135 in a field of 976, and a new team, TrojAUnHorses, placed in the top 18 percent, placing 178.
Students in root@au were Franklin George, Nathan Rackley, Hyeokjin Oh, Annie Nastasi, Nicholas Fowler, Zachary Seiter and Sofia Deambrosi.
Students in TrojAUnHorses were Genevieve Bronson, Seth Taylor, Alexis Mahaffey, Jared Matthews, Mason Kellam, Sean St Clair and Jacob Cordeiro.
Dr. Kenneth Knapp, Director of the Center for Cybersecurity, commented, “The AU CTF (Capture the Flag) team continues to perform brilliantly with outstanding results. Several students have commented to me that internship and full-time employers are very interested and impressed with the Cyber CTFs and AU’s results… it has helped students to land jobs. CTF participation is a great resumé builder and students have fun in the process.”
Each team had seven students, according to Grech, and both teams completed all open-source intelligence challenges.
“These challenges required using open-source resources to discover information regarding cryptocurrency, banking, licenses and geolocating images,” Grech said. “This performance is a testimony to the amount of practice these students put into their craft during our regular CTF practices within Anderson University’s custom, self-hosted, persistent CTF training platform that is open to all Anderson University students.”
Grech continued, “Most team members will be returning to Anderson University next year to compete again; however, others have graduated and are putting their tested cybersecurity skills to great use in the workforce. These graduates are now performing cybersecurity within various sectors of critical infrastructure (energy and financial services) or are working as a penetration tester to hack into systems before the bad guys find these security holes. That is the goal, to develop cybersecurity students that are ready to face and solve real-world cybersecurity challenges in the workforce—not just in competitions.”
The NCL games offer students a variety of challenges to test their cybersecurity skills in areas that include identifying hackers, auditing vulnerable websites and recovering from ransomware attacks.
The Anderson University Center for Cybersecurity trains students to meet the unique demands of today’s cybersecurity industry. Degree tracks focus on cybersecurity with specializations in analytics, criminal justice, or mathematics. Details can be found online.
See the results of the spring 2022 ranked list from the NCL competition. Click the ‘Team Game’ tab to see the Overall standings.