As governments and organizations face increasingly serious threats from nefarious cyber attackers, cybersecurity experts must employ creative thinking and be able to respond to new information quickly. A team of students at Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) recently had the opportunity to put the lessons they have learned in the classroom into practice at the first annual Deloitte Foundation Cyber Threat Competition, where they placed fourth.
“It was a very real-world scenario that we were asked to respond to,” said Brady Ripka, a member of the team who graduated on May 9 with a bachelor’s degree in IST.
The competition was designed and facilitated by Deloitte Cyber Risk Services, which helps complex organizations more confidently leverage advanced technologies to achieve their strategic growth, innovation and performance objectives through proactive management of the associated cyber risks. To reach the live, final round cyber wargame event, students successfully navigated online competitions with the highest scorers from each institution advancing to the next round. The top advancing four competitors from each school were then teamed together to face-off during the final two-day cyberattack simulation challenge held in mid-April at Deloitte University, the organization’s landmark campus for learning and leadership development near Dallas.
A team representing the University of Southern California won the Cyber Threat Competition. In addition to Penn State, other participating institutions were Carnegie Mellon University, Georgetown University, Texas A&M, University of Houston and University of Illinois .
The Penn State team was coached by Matt Miller, a 2013 IST graduate who now works for Deloitte.
The competition consisted of three rounds that have taken place over the last two months. The first round was an online cyber quiz and the second was an online cyber challenge.The highlight of the event was the live, final round -- the Cyber Wargame event. The top four competitors from each participating institution represented their school and faced off during the two-day challenge that simulated a real corporate environment in a cyber attack scenario.
According to IST team member John Kissell, who recently graduated with a degree in Security and Risk Analysis (SRA), the final challenge in the competition required the team members to think outside the box. The scenario that was presented to the teams was that they were employed by a multi-national bank, and just received word that they were going to be targeted by cyber attackers. The scoring system, Kissell said, was based on the team members’ ability to reason through the process of responding to the threat. The team members applied many of the lessons they learned in their IST classes in formulating their plan.
“We were trying to bend the rules as much as possible,” Kissell said, adding that the team’s creative approach was recognized by the judges.
Ripka and Kissell said that their experiences with the Cyber Threat Competition were helpful in preparing them for their careers. Both of them have positions lined up in the cybersecurity field—Ripka for EY in Houston, and Kissell for PwC in Washington, D.C. Kissell said that one of the most enlightening aspects of the Cyber Threat Competition was the realization that many of the lessons that were taught in his SRA classes can be directly applied to cyber threat analysis in the real world.
“People are getting paid to do the exact same thing for companies,” he said.