5th at National CCDC Competition

This year, being on the Northeastern CCDC team, we made it to the national Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition in Texas. After two days of intense competition, we placed 5th in the nation!

This was undoubtedly the most stressful and fun cybersecurity experience I’ve ever had. We were given the diagram of the network infrastructure only an hour before the start of the competition, and we scrambled to establish a game plan. At competition start, we immediately began to secure our machines, which were riddled with misconfigurations and vulnerabilities. I really enjoyed the realism of the competition, and some much needed comic relief came with every ring of our company phone which we answered in our best customer-service voice. The red team had quickly established persistence within the first half hour of the competition, but we did our best to remediate our systems and block further attacks.

This experience not only tested our cybersecurity skills but also fostered camaraderie and resourcefulness, making it a defining chapter in my cybersecurity journey.