Cyber Competitions

Security Competitions

Cybersecurity competitions are learning opportunities for students and provide an added hands-on experience beyond the labs used in our courses to enhance the knowledge and skills of Murray State Cybersecurity students.  A listing of Cyber Competitions are listed below.

• US Cyber Challenge - US Cyber Challenge (USCC) is a program previously supported by the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate through a contract with the Center for Internet Security, a 501c(3) organization. USCC serves as the premiere program to identify, attract, train, recruit, and place the next generation of cybersecurity professionals into the workforce.

• DEF CON - DEF CON (also written as DEFCON, Defcon or DC) is one of the world's largest and most notable hacker conventions, held annually in Las Vegas, Nevada. The first DEF CON took place in June 1993 and today many attendees at DEF CON include computer security professionals, journalists, lawyers, federal government employees, security researchers, students, and hackers with a general interest in software, computer architecture, hardware modification, conference badges, and anything else that can be "hacked". 

• Panoply - Panoply, a Network Security Competition, is a network assessment and network defense competition combined into a single event. Teams of students compete for control of common resources and the critical services on those resources. Once a team takes possession of a resource, they must secure that resource against attacks from other teams and maintain the critical services running on the resource. Teams accumulate points for controlling and operating critical services such as SMTP, DNS, HTTP, HTTPS, SSH, and so on.

• US Cyber Challenge - Cyber Quests are a series of fun but challenging on-line competitions allowing participants to demonstrate their knowledge in a variety of information security realms. Each quest features an artifact for analysis, along with a series of quiz questions. Some quests focus on a potentially vulnerable sample web server as the artifact, challenging participants to identify its flaws using vulnerability analysis skills. Other quests are focused around forensic analysis, packet capture analysis, and more. The quests have varying levels of difficulty and complexity, with some quests geared toward beginners, while others include more intermediate and ultimately advanced material.

• Southeast CPTC - The Global Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition (CPTC) started small, in a classroom at RIT. Bill Stackpole, a professor of Defensive and Offensive Security, saw a gap between book learning and the real world that he wanted to close in order to set his students up for success after graduation.  

• National Cyber League - The National Cyber League (NCL) is a biannual cybersecurity competition for high school and college students. The competition consists of a series of challenges that allows students to demonstrate their ability to identify hackers from forensic data, break into vulnerable websites, recover from ransomware attacks, and more. Students compete in the NCL to build their skills, obtain scouting reports of their performance for hiring purposes, and to represent their school.

For more information contact Dr. Randall Joyce, CNM Program Coordinator.