PRCCDC 2008

Pacific Rim Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition: 2008

A very successful collegiate competition focused on computer and network security and administration was held on Microsoft's Redmond campus on April 26-27, 2008, sponsored by various companies and educational institutions.

About 70 students from assorted Pacific Rim universities and community/technical colleges — including UW Tacoma's Institute of Technology — competed as teams under the banner of their respective educational institutions. These "blue" teams made valiant attempts to defend their fictitious company's computing assets from attackers (the "red" team of security professionals) while they performed system and network administration tasks assigned to them by equally fictitious company bosses. The scenario attempted to duplicate — in an intense, two-day event — what computing professionals might encounter if hired into a poorly-administered environment. The teams were judged (by the "white" team) on how well they performed the assigned tasks as well as how available their network services were.

Here you can see the event in a series of pictures taken by Don McLane. A video documentary of the competition will be available in a few months.

UW Tacoma sent a team of students to the competition: Gary Belvin, Justin Carton, Darin Cyr, Matthew Fiebig, Daniel De Jager, Ruslan Slobodyanik, and Parker Thompson.

Pictures of the UW Tacoma team in action

The event was the culmination of months of planning by a team of security-minded volunteers, headed by Dr. Barbara Endicott-Popovsky of the Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity at UW Seattle. Don McLane, a networks and security lecturer at the Institute of Technology, coordinated UW Tacoma's effort, securing the loan of Cisco networking equipment, advising UW Tacoma student Rick Davidson as Rick prepared the Cisco routers, supplying workstations for the non-student teams, training the UW Tacoma team, providing insight on the operation of a competition from the 2007 Fort Lewis collegiate cyber defense exercise, and much more.

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