(CAE-CD)

Sponsored by DOE’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER), the CyberForce Competition is DOE’s fourth cyber defense competition designed to develop the next generation of cybersecurity professionals to help defend and bolster our nation’s critical energy infrastructure and ensure our energy security.

This year’s competition featured approximately 70 teams competing over seven National Labs: Argonne National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories.

During this two-day competition, students got hands-on cybersecurity experience defending their team’s infrastructure from attacks by “Red” teams composed of industry cyber professionals.  Teams are scored on continuously maintain system operations and avoiding service disruptions.

The competition’s interactive, energy-focused scenario challenged students to protect their servers, as well as their physical, simulated industrial control system.  Students had to be able to identify potential threats in a prebuilt computer network filled with intentional vulnerabilities.

Over the last several weeks, the Highline team spent countless hours of personal time to be able to resolve, identify and mitigate those problems and threats, and to present a unified front to field a competitive team in this competition.

The Highline team watched as systems belonging to other teams quickly became compromised and in some cases held for ransom by their attackers, while the Highline systems withheld many attacks.  System hardening, network engineering, and integration of an intrusion detection system allowed the Highline team to quickly act on hostile intrusion attempts.   Our Red team said later that they wondered if their tools were broken, and had asked other attack teams to verify their failed results.

The six Highline Thunderbirds team members are all students in Highline’s Bachelor of Applied Science in Cybersecurity and Forensics program:

• Paul Bracken
• Andrew Canino
• Sarah Conrad
• Lauren Gallegos
• Kevin Hall
• Quentin Mattson

They were accompanied by two Highline faculty and staff members:

• Simone Jarzabek
• Justin Pedersen

Highline’s team finished 10^th overall nationwide.  We were the only college in the top ten.

Our students felt that this experience was an amazing opportunity to put the skills they have learned at Highline College to the test, and helped to build confidence in themselves.  The success they found as a team was amazing.  They are first class cyber defense competitors and should be commended for their hard work.  Go Highline Thunderbirds!

The next competition will be held from November 15 to 16, 2019. Highline will again be applying to send a team of Highline students to the Department of Energy’s CyberForce Competition™, a DOE Cyber Defense Competition at Pacific Northwest National Labs in Richland, Washington.

Highline students are compiling a list of lessons learned from this year’s competition.  There are several technical areas in which they would like to gain more experience over the next year, so they can be even more effective competitors.