Tuesday, April 19, 2016

The UNCW Cyber Defense Club was among the eight teams in the southeastern region invited to participate in the Southeast Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition at Kennesaw State University earlier this month.

The competitive event brings together universities from seven states to test students’ cyber defense and business skills. Cyber defense focuses on protecting computers, networks, programs and data from unintended or unauthorized access, change or destruction.

The team configured a mock organization’s network to block attacks from a group of hackers during the competition. While they constantly fought cyber attacks, the team also had to handle “injections,” normal business operations such as adding users to the network, handling customer requests and performing incident response from intrusions.

UNCW’s club engaged in a virtual competition against 27 colleges and universities in order to qualify for the regional competition, finishing in the top eight to move on to the regional competition held April 6-7 in Kennesaw, Ga.

Members of the Cyber Defense Club are James Barasorda, Brandon Bonnette, Will Britt, John Cole, William Fleming, Brian Griffin, Scott Hollenbeck and Steve Myrick.

“While we did not place at the regional competition, our students competed strong, gained valuable experience and are already preparing for the competition next year,” said Jeff Cummings, assistant professor of information systems and faculty advisor to the club.

--Venita Jenkins

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