For the eighth time in 15 years, Cal Poly Pomona students represented the West in the National Collegiate Cybersecurity Defense Competition, finishing second in 2024 out of a field of 198 teams.
The 2023-2024 CCDC team, a cross-discipline mix of computer information systems, computer science and engineering majors, traveled to Center for Infrastructure Assurance and Security at The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) in April for the finals where they were narrowly beat out my 2021 and 2022 winners, University of Central Florida.
“The main strength of our team was that a lot of people were able to adapt on the fly and we had a lot of people who specialized in multiple areas of the competition,” computer information student and team captain Evan Deters said. “The team in 2023-2024 were very fresh, but everyone was good learners.”
This year’s NCCDC tasked competitors with the scenario of managing, operating and defending the network infrastructure of a human resource outsourcing firm while responding to business tasks, customers, and fending off a group of live Red Team hackers.
“The scenario we developed for this elite group of students is very realistic,” said Dwayne Williams, Director of the NCCDC and associate director at the CIAS. “The primary challenge this year is securing large amounts of personally identifiable information across different industries and states, but also dealing with a company acquisition while being targeted by bad actors. These unique challenges and hands-on experiences help each of these teams prepare for the real-world scenarios they will face after graduation.”
The competition’s unique focus on operational aspects of managing and protecting a network infrastructure is designed to assess each student’s depth of understanding and operational competency. This marked eighth time in 15 years Cal Poly Pomona students represented the West at the National Collegiate Cybersecurity Defense Competition.
"The last two years we’ve been focusing on how to communication flowing between the different team members and how we could get a good workflow going," Deters said. "I believe we ended within one or two percent of their final score, so it was very close."
2024 Cal Poly Pomona CCDC Team
Evan Deters – Computer Information Systems
Sydney Duong – Computer Information Systems
Bill Luong – Computer Information Systems
Dylan Michalak – Computer Science
Tanay Shah – Computer Science
Marshall Ung - Engineering
2024 National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition Results
- University of Central Florida
- Cal Poly Pomona
- University of Texas at Austin