The Purdue University Northwest Hammond campus hosted the Midwest Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition on Friday and Saturday. Twelve colleges sent teams from Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Kentucky, Missouri and Ohio to participate in six-hour and nine-hour cybersecurity defense marathons protecting mock-up businesses from “hacker" attacks.
Armed with Fritos, chips, energy drinks and water, the students began the process of defending their pretend clients from "successful attacks” by the hacking team, comprised of volunteers and alumni of the competition.
The hacking team uses compromised information from a competing team’s server to take it down, or the hacker can use a systems’ vulnerabilities to take it down, explained Indiana Tech’s Captain Timothy Bukowski, a senior and third-year participant of the Midwest Regional competition.
A team can earn points by correctly identifying what a hacker did to take down a server, or at least get partial points for getting close to it, Bukowski said.
Computer Information Technology and Graphics Department Chair Keyuan Jiang said it was PNW’s second time hosting the Midwest competition, in partnership with Moraine Valley Community College in Palos Hills, Illinois. The winner of the competition goes to the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition for a longer and more intense competition.
Second place in this weekend’s competition will get a shot at redemption, to battle it out with second-place finishers from other regional competitions for a Wild Card pick. The national competition takes place in California.
The type of training and ramifications the students prepare for go deeper than employees writing down simple passwords on notepads.
“We had a great quote by one of the advisors years ago,” said Director of Competition Operations David Durkee. “He said, ‘The CCDC gives students five years of experience in eight hours.’ It's exaggerated to make a point, but it's got a lot of truth there.
“(The students) are not working so much with individual users, but they're working with the core networks and core facilities of various corporations and government agencies to assure that all of their operations and the services that they run are kept secure and they don't get broken into."
The strength of a company’s cybersecurity and its vulnerabilities have reached new levels of attention from the federal government, hackers and Hollywood. In the popular HBO Max drama series "The Pitt," currently streaming, a main focal point of its second season is the hospital the television program is set in had to shut off its internet access and most computers after hackers froze operations and neighboring hospitals and demanded high ransoms from them.
“Ransomware is very significant,” Durkee said, “And of course, medical records are a very key item. We have strict laws now that when it comes to HIPAA … personal information on medical records … so you don't want threat actors getting a hold of these records and threatening to expose those in any way.”
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