The 2010 set of Midwest State Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) provides an opportunity for qualified educational institutions in the Midwest to compete.Qualified educational institutions include those with information assurance or computer security curricula. The Midwest State Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition is designed to provide a controlled competitive environment that will permit each participating institution to assess their students’ depth of understanding and operational competency in managing the challenges inherent in protecting an enterprise network infrastructure and business information systems.
Midwest Collegiate Cyber Defence Competitions are sponsored by CSSIA, the Center for Systems Security and Information Assurance.The competition is designed to test each student team’s ability to secure a networked computer system while maintaining standard business functionality. The scenario involves team members simulating a group of employees from an IT service company that will initiate administration of an IT infrastructure. The teams are expected to manage the computer network, keep it operational, and prevent unauthorized access. Each team will be expected to maintain and provide public services: a web site, a secure web site, an email server, a database server, and a workstation used by simulated sales, marketing, and research staff as per company policy and mission. Each team will start the competition with a set of identically configured systems.
The objective of the competition is to measure a team’s ability to maintain secure computer network operations in a simulated business environment.This is not just a technical competition, but also one built upon the foundation of business operations, policy, and procedures.A technical success that adversely impacts the business operation will result in a lower score as will a business success which results in security weaknesses.[A detailed business scenario, organizational chart, policy and procedures manual, and contract award specifications will be distributed along with technical specifications prior to the exercise to allow teams to develop their team and capabilities.]
Student teams will be scored on the basis of their ability to detect and respond to outside threats, including cyber attack while maintaining availability of existing network services such as mail servers and web servers, respond to business requests such as the addition or removal of additional services, and balance security against varying business needs.
