Southeast's Cyber-Defense Club to test skills

The Cyber-Defense Club at Southeast Missouri State University will take part in a competition on Saturday that will determine if its cybersecurity skills are enough to be called the best in the state.

"It's going to be hectic," said Jeremy Wiedner, club president and a cybersecurity major at Southeast. "But we've familiarized ourselves with various computer systems and possible attacks and threats, and we're excited and ready to go."

The Cyber-Defense Club is participating in the Missouri Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition, scheduled from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. From a computer lab at Southeast, eight club members will log in to a computer network hosted by the Moraine Valley Community College in Chicago, Ill., to put their cybersecurity skills to the test.

Wiedner said team members will pretend to be employees of a fictional company.

"A company recently fired its information-technology team," he explained, "and we're being brought in to replace them. We'll have a limited time to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the company's information systems and make security updates before the fun starts."

Competition begins when a Red Team attacks the company's information systems.

"The Red Team is made up of cybersecurity professionals who know many ways to corrupt a system," Wiendner said. "We'll be judged by how we identify the threats they create and how well we handle them."

The team also will be judged and scored on how members perform tasks required by the company within a certain time.

"We'll have to perform those tasks while we're fighting the hackers," Wiedner said. "It will be a little tricky, but I'm confident we'll do well as a team."

The club will compete against a team from the Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla, Mo. The group that best handles the attacks and performs its required tasks will represent Missouri in the Midwest Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition.

Travis Holland, club vice president, said there are no prizes for competing; just recognition.

"It helps us a lot by being able to get the club's name out there," said Holland, a double-major in cyber security and computer science at Southeast. "It also helps that we're getting the name of Southeast's cybersecurity program out there, too."

Southeast's cybersecurity program, which began in fall 2011, is designed to educate students in the existing and emerging challenges in the field in which the U.S. Department of Labor expects 22 percent growth in jobs during the next decade.

"This competition allows students to get some security experience beyond the confines of a classroom," said Dr. Vijay Anand, the faculty adviser who teaches many of the program's courses. "Students can apply concepts learned in the cybersecurity classes to a real world situation of protecting digital assets from adversaries."

Other club members are Jake Schnurbusch, Battle Tomasetti, R.D. Niroshan Lakmal Rajapakse, Melanie Thiemann, Charity Meyer and Blynn Atchley.

For more information on the Cyber-Defense Club, visit semocdc.com. For more information on the cybersecurity program at Southeast, visit semo.edu.

klewis@semissourian.com

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