University Park, Pennsylvania — A team of Penn State University students recently placed third out of 169 universities in the US Department of Energy’s annual Cyberforce competition. The team, made up of members of the university’s Competitive Cyber Security Organization (CCSO), also placed him third at last year’s event.
Part of DOE’s CyberForce program, the CyberForce competition, November 4-5 in St. Charles, Illinois, uses a hands-on security approach to engage students in emergency scenarios Did.
The event aims to teach students skills related to protecting the nation’s critical energy sector and to provide a platform to apply those skills. This year, students were tasked with defending a car manufacturer’s virtual infrastructure.
“This competition gives college students the opportunity to learn not only about cybersecurity, but also about the technologies used in modern power grids,” said team member Petr Esakov, senior electrical engineer. “Our team’s goal in this competition is to minimize the impact of cyberattacks and better detect and analyze problems, just like in a real-world organization.”
CCSO Advisor and Associate Professor at the University of Information Science and Technology, Nick Giacobe, said the competition provided students with hands-on, surreal experience in cyber defense.
“CyberForce’s critical infrastructure perspective brings these cyber concepts to meaningful real-world applications,” said Giacobe. “Penn State continues to rank high in the competition with his third place finish this year, and students are poised to rise to the challenge and become important players in the cybersecurity industry. I am proving that.”
Team member Jenna Fox says that working together helped the team overcome the biggest challenge: time.
Fox, a sophomore in cybersecurity analytics and operations, said: “From hardening the system to completing the executive brief, we have always taken great care to make sure everything is as good as possible.”
“I think our communication and teamwork set us apart from everyone else,” she said.
