UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A team of Penn State students recently took third place in the regional finals of the Mid-Atlantic Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (MACCDC). The event, held at Prince George Community College in Largo, Maryland, featured 185 students from 23 colleges and universities.

The MACCDC provides the hands-on application of cybersecurity skills to enhance students’ understanding of both theory and practice, according to the program’s website. The competition is designed to introduce scenarios that imitate the real world and highlight concerns like security breaches.  

Student teams, known as blue teams, worked as the information technology department of a simulated distribution company to secure and defend the company’s network from attackers — known as red teams — while ensuring that business operations continued smoothly. They earned scores for their performance on incident response, communication with company executives and customers, defense against hackers, and other categories.

“We had 48 hours to do the impossible,” said Jenna Fox, a second-year student majoring in cybersecurity analytics and operations and a member of the competition team. “We had to balance technology with business tasks while defending our company against the live hackers on the red team.”

Fox is the president of Penn State’s Competitive Cyber Security Organization (CCSO), a cross-disciplinary student group coordinated through the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) that facilitates an informative environment where members from all educational levels and backgrounds can master safe computing practices. The cyber defense competition team was composed of members of CCSO.

Team captain Liam Geyer, a second-year student majoring in cybersecurity analytics and operations, is the CCSO vice president. He said the group meets regularly in anticipation of competitions like the MACCDC and last November’s U.S. Department of Energy’s annual CyberForce competition, where Penn State placed third out of 169 universities.

“One of the ways IST prepared us for MACCDC was by exposing us to different technologies through our coursework and ensuring that we understood the importance of real-world business interactions,” Geyer said. “The blend of cybersecurity with security and risk analysis classes in our curriculum provided us with a great foundation for tackling the complex technical and corporate asks of CCDC’s fast-paced environment.”

CCSO adviser Nick Giacobe, associate teaching professor in the College of IST, said it was “awesome” to watch the students work together to solve problems they had not anticipated.

“All teams were equally caught off guard by the red team taking down their systems,” he said. “At the lunch break of the first day, I helped them re-think their strategy and reminded them of their strengths — and off they went! While our students had the technical skill that was required, it was teamwork that won the day and captured the attention of some of the sponsors.”

Like Geyer and Fox, CCSO team members Jacob Dorchinsky, Kira Leavitt, Brendan McShane and Jackson Ortiz are majoring in cybersecurity analytics and operations. The bachelor’s degree program teaches the skills needed to help ensure the safety of critical information and assets. Students learn to protect information from hackers, discover security vulnerabilities and investigate and communicate cyberthreats and attacks.

Teammates Shawn Cooper and Liz Stroud are computer science majors from Penn State’s College of Engineering, which prepares students for careers as computer scientists, software engineers, software developers and other positions in the field of computing. Students learn to design, develop, evaluate and analyze software solutions to a wide spectrum of computational problems.

The third-place regional finish was the team’s best effort to date, but Geyer said he wants to do even better next year. The team will recruit members, hold tryouts and hone their skills with weekly and biweekly meetings.

“We’re going to get an earlier start next year to build a skilled team,” he said.