7th at National CCDC Competition

WOHOO!! We made it to CCDC nationals again this year! After competing in qualifiers in February and the Northeast regional against 10 other schools in March, we placed first and were able to go to San Antonio, Texas to compete nationally.

This year, we were an HR company called HR-Hydra who had recently acquired another company, Roxxon. Like last year, we were given a diagram of the network about an hour before the start of competition. I was assigned to three Linux systems which were running about five scored web services each. I immediately secured them, the services, and made appropriate backups, and worked on the incoming injects (assigned tasks from the ‘CEO’).

Unfortunately, our downfall was the physical Palo Alto firewall. We had unplugged all our ethernet cables from our switch, plugged them into the firewall, and tried to deploy our policy, but it failed and resulted in us turning all our computers into bricks for three hours as we tried to get everything back up and running. Thankfully, we eventually recovered, but our phone never started working again and so we missed out on earning any orange team points for the entire competition.

This mistake was a huge hit to possible earned points, but we maintained hopeful and persisted. Overall, we didn’t see much red team activity (they later admitted they were not as strong this year) and the rest of the competition went mostly smoothly.

We placed 7th, and though I wanted to score higher, I’m so grateful to have experienced this competition again. It’s the most fun I’ve had while also being the most stressed.