Cyber/Skills Competitions

Computer Networking & Security Technology offers cyber security students multiple opportunities to compete in regional and National competitions. These competitions help students practice the skills they are training for in their courses.  Below is a description of each competition:

National Cyber League (NCL)

The NCL provides students an ongoing virtual training ground for faculty and students to develop and validate cybersecurity skills using content aligned with individual and team games – which is scalable across many industry certifications, curricula, and job roles. In order to help players develop knowledge and hands-on skills, prepare for the NCL games, and the CompTIA Security+™ and EC-Council Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH)™ certification exams, the NCL provides a series of hands-on preparatory lab exercises, hosted in its virtual Gymnasiums.

The NCL games measured and validated the following competencies:

– Open Source Intelligence
– Network Traffic Analysis
– Log Analysis
– Scanning & Reconnaissance
– Access Exploitation
– Cryptography
– Password Cracking
– Web Application Exploitation
– Enumeration & Exploitation

In the fall of 2015, the Computer Networking & Security Technology team ranked as one of the Top Teams (Nationally, Silver Bracket) for the Fall 2015 Season. 2,153 players from over 300 colleges and universities competed in the NCL 2015 Fall Season. A total of 129 teams competed during the Post Season Event.

National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC)

CCDC is a tiered competition that exercises both technical business skills. CCDC focuses on the operational aspects of managing and protecting an existing “commercial” network infrastructure.  Teams secure, manage and maintain a small business network. Team members respond to business tasks called “injects”, while a live “Red Team” attempts to break into the system.

 
SkillsUSA Internetworking Championships

The contest consists of three main parts–networking design, general networking knowledge and hands-on evaluations. The networking design problem tests a contestant’s ability to design functionality, scalability, adaptability and manageability of an internetworking system. The online written portion tests the student’s complete knowledge of internetworking concepts. The hands-on component demonstrates the abilities of the contestant to make cables, troubleshoot network systems, configure routers, switches and servers, to deliver customer service in a technical assistant center environment. The contestants will find errors in WAN and LAN networks; do an ISP configuration using routers and switches; talk a technician through an error they are having on their network; and, take an online, certification type test. The national contest is based on the most current CCNA certification. In today’s job market system administration skills are needed, therefore the server skills listed here will be scored: Install DNS, create a record, install active directory service, and DHCP. In addition, contestants should have knowledge of creating user and group accounts on Windows Server 2008.