SECCDCSoutheast Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition

SECCDC

The Southeast Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition is hosted by the L3 Harris Institute for Assured Information at Florida Institute of Technology.

Southeast Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition 

The mission of the Southeast Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (SECCDC) system is to provide institutions with an information assurance or computer security curriculum in a controlled, competitive environment to assess their student's depth of understanding and operational competency in managing the challenges inherent in protecting a corporate network infrastructure and business information systems.

 SECCDC Events are designed to:

• Build a meaningful mechanism by which higher education institutions may evaluate their cybersecurity programs.
• Provide an educational venue where students can apply the theory and practical skills they learned in their coursework.
• Foster a spirit of teamwork, ethical behavior, and effective communication within and across teams.
• Create interest and awareness among participating institutions and students.
• Select the team to compete in the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition.

 

SECCDC competitions ask student teams to assume administrative and protective duties for an existing “commercial” network – typically a small company with 50+ users and up to 10 services across eight servers. Each team begins the competition with an identical set of hardware and software and is scored on their ability to detect and respond to outside threats, maintain the availability of existing services such as mail servers and web servers, respond to business requests such as the addition or removal of additional services, and balance security needs against business needs. Throughout the competition, an automated scoring engine is used to periodically verify the functionality and availability of each team’s services. Traffic generators continuously feed simulated user traffic into the competition network. A volunteer red team comprised of industry experts provides the “external threat” all Internet-based services face and allows the teams to match their defensive skills against live opponents.