Cookeville, TN – The Cybersecurity Education, Research and Outreach Center (CEROC) is proud to announce that student affiliates of the center had a strong showing in the Fall 2019 Season of the National Cyber League (NCL) Individual Game competition. Per the NCL website (https://www.nationalcyberleague.org/), “The NCL is a defensive and offensive puzzle-based, capture-the-flag style cybersecurity competition. Its virtual training ground helps high school and college students prepare and test themselves against cybersecurity challenges that they will likely face in the workforce. All participants play the games simultaneously during Preseason, Individual Game and Team Game… The NCL challenges are based on the CompTIA Security+™ and EC-Council Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH)™ performance-based exam objectives and include the following content: Open Source Intelligence, Scanning, Enumeration and Exploitation, Password Cracking, Traffic Analysis, Log Analysis, Wireless Security, Cryptography, and Web Application Security.”
In all 5,224 individuals competed from across the nation with Tennessee Tech having four members rank in the top 100. Phillip (Andy) Brown dominated the field placing 8th overall in the nation with 1st place finishes in open source intelligence and traffic analysis placing him in the top 0.15% of all competitors. Three other students, Austin Brown (23rd), Austin Tice (52nd), and Alex Marti (92nd) would finish in the top 100. Other members appearing in the to 10% are
- Andy Brown – 8
- Austin Brown – 23
- Austin Tice – 52
- Alex Marti – 92
- Kendall Land – 136
- Joshua Vick – 169
- Susie Jeziorowski – 215
- Connor Gannon – 476
- Trey Burks – 519
Travis Lee, Cybersecurity Technologist for CEROC and Tennessee Tech NCL Team Coach, commented “This is the strongest showing in the history of Tennessee Tech’s participation in the competition. The dedication of these students to this competitive work is incredible. We are very proud of them.”
The next phase of the competition will be the team-oriented. The team competition will be held November 15-17, 2019. “We look forward to another strong showing in the teams round” stated Eric Brown, CEROC’s assistant director. “These competition opportunities help the students develop valuable, hands-on skills which complement their classroom work. Companies consider these skills demonstrations to be as important as the degree itself.”
Two other Tennessee Tech teams will be traveling to Oak Ridge National Labs later this week to compete in the Department of Energy’s CyberForce Competition. Tech will be sending a defense team to the competition as well as offensive security group members to serve on the competition’s red team.