Lake Superior College takes third in cyber defense competition – Duluth News Tribune

DULUTH — Lake Superior College’s cyber safety staff took third on the digital Minnesota State Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition on Feb. 5.

This locations the staff in the Midwest Wildcard qualifier on Saturday, additionally digital, the place they compete for the prospect to advance to the regional competition March 18-19.

Nine Minnesota State System establishments had been challenged to stop a staged cyber assault in the annual, daylong occasion Feb. 5. This is the third 12 months LSC has positioned third.

Competitors protected an present business community in a managed digital setting to imitate a small firm with not less than 50 customers and 7 to 10 servers, with primary web providers like an online server, mail server and e-commerce website. A volunteer “purple staff” took a hacker function and attacked all the web-primarily based providers for rivals to detect.

“This was my first competition of this type,” Ryan Kleffman, a primary-12 months scholar in LSC’s cyber safety diploma program, mentioned. “I’ve had a earlier competition if you end up tasked with organising a pc, however by no means whereas being attacked. It was extremely distinctive.”

Kleffman maintained the e-mail server by creating firewalls and detecting potential hackers. Kleffman attended LSC’s GenCyber summer season camps in center faculty, which led to an curiosity in cyber safety and defense.

A fellow teammate in community administration and cyber safety, Jeremy Simon, mentioned a professor introduced up the competition per week earlier than, inflicting an onslaught of rigorous preparation efforts.

“I had little or no prep time to prepare for it. I discovered all the things I wanted to in that week to arrange,” Simon mentioned. “I made a sport plan and I wrote all of it out. It was fairly aggravating, however it paid off.”

Intense preparation efforts carried LSC’s cyber safety staff to a prime spot, Simon mentioned.

“There was a number of analysis concerned,” Kleffman mentioned. “I used to be drowning in information about e-mail servers, encryption and SQL (a kind of coding). The week main as much as the competition was a stress fest, however it was price it.”

Metropolitan State University took first; Minneapolis College took second; Lake Superior College took third; and Pine Technical and Community College took fourth.

Lake Superior College is the one two-12 months group and technical faculty in Minnesota to earn a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense designation by the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security.