Activities that occur approximately every 60 to 90 minutes throughout the cyber defense competition which are designed to keep Blue Teams engaged and slightly off balance just as real IT staffs get engaged in new projects and may overlook intrusions or security risks in new implementations. Anomalies may run counter to the goal of having secure systems or may be to have the teams install some of the latest software that opens holes in their servers. The Blue Team must then decide how, or if, to implement the request on their network and how to implement it security.
Published in Chapter:
Cyber Defense Competitions as Learning Tools: Serious Applications for Information Warfare Games
Julie A. Rursch (Iowa State University, USA) and Doug Jacobson (Iowa State University, USA)
Copyright: © 2012
|Pages: 18
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-0149-9.ch004
Abstract
In a cyber defense competition, students design, configure, and maintain a set of servers and a network in a secure manner. The students’ goal during the competition is to prevent security breaches and to remediate any exploits that occur while maintaining a fully functional network for their end users. Cyber defense competitions provide active student learning, mimic real-world situations, and provide engagement with computer and network security topics. To date, Iowa State University has hosted 18 cyber defense competitions across four divisions: high school students, community college students, ISU students, and four-year university students from across the nation. This chapter provides a brief history of cyber defense competitions, as well as describes how they are run. The authors also address the needs of different audiences who participate in cyber defense competitions and show that beyond building and strengthening computer and network security skills, cyber defense competitions can be used for recruitment, retention, advanced training, and experimentation for students.