RANGELY | This is SPARTA! Another incredible achievement for students at Colorado Northwestern Community College (CNCC) — the cybersecurity program participated in the National Cyber League 2023 competitions in April and achieved competitive scores.
The competition serves as an experience for students to practice their skills and tools in a high-pressure environment over nine competencies. It is divided into individual and team events. They compete in games designed to utilize skills necessary in the field. At the end of the competition, they are given a score report detailing their strengths and weaknesses. The report also helps employers understand the competitors’ skills and is used by recruiters to seek the skillsets they desire in employees. Several cybersecurity program students from CNCC already have job offers from top firms such as Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen Hamilton.
Cybersecurity students from Colorado Northwestern Community College participated as individuals and as teams in the National Cyber League competition this spring, earning competitive scores. | COURTESY PHOTO
The Individual Game is where participants compete against all the student players in the National Cyber League (NCL), even the other student players from CNCC. Performance from the Individual Game is used to award prizes and calculate CNCC’s Cyber Power Ranking. This spring, there were 6,223 individual national competitors.
The Team Game is where groups of participants compete against all the NCL teams, even the teams from CNCC. Performance from the Team Game is used to award prizes and calculate CNCC’s Cyber Power Ranking. This spring, there were 3,593 national team competitors. The subjects included open-source intelligence, network traffic analysis, cryptography, and forensics.
The mission statement of the NCL states, “We are passionate and mission-driven to embrace, support and encourage any student with a passion for learning, whether in high school or college, those taking a full course load or just one class, a student just beginning their journey or already in love with CTFs, and students of any age. NCL and our player ambassadors are proud to support and celebrate the diversity and inclusion of any participant, regardless of ethnicity, race, gender and sexual orientation, religion, age and disability.”
The competition is sponsored by Cyber Skyline, CompTIA, and WiCys (Women in Cybersecurity.) Last fall, Lockheed Martin sponsored the competition.
The cybersecurity degree program at CNCC is a new program offered for the 2022-2023 academic calendar year. The college is able to provide the program with a grant from the State of Colorado Attorney General’s office for $500,000 to inspire and cultivate innovation and talent within the community they serve. The grant was funded by a lawsuit against Equifax for a data breach — suggesting the need for more diverse and fluent talent in the field. CNCC and the cybersecurity program strive to prepare today’s learners for immediate opportunities. Some of the students from the program shared personal testimonies of the opportunity of this experience.
Draken Blackwing, who led the competition, shared his motivation for participating. “I saw the potential for NCL helping me to grow my skills and see what I have learned in the cybersecurity classes from Colorado Northwestern Community College along with what areas I still need to improve to be successful in a cybersecurity field.”
Gwen Doizaki, who led the “Gone Phishing” team and secured an internship with Lockheed Martin upon her graduation from CNCC, described the competition as “nerve-racking” and the “most valuable” experience of her student career. “The games as a whole simulated the sort of work I’ll do in the future regardless of specialty or seniority, pushing me to my limit and forcing me to research, learn and experiment as I went. Getting to lead one of our school’s three teams was an incredibly instructive and rewarding experience that will inform not only my leadership style but, ironically, my individual work style going forward.”
Josh Day expressed his feelings and efforts by describing his preparation. “I spent hours practicing in the gymnasium, an open section that contained similar questions and how to solve them; however, I didn’t know how similar they would be. I hit the ground running, jumping from question to question until bam, I hit my first wall. While I was familiar with a fair few of the challenges and formats put in place, there was a slew of new and exciting tools and encryptions that I didn’t know existed. I had to scour the internet for hours, but I cracked many codes that were giving me difficulty. The night before the team games, I felt like a kid on Christmas Eve; my nerves and excitement were high as my mind raced to try to predict what I was going to have to do.”
Student James L. Gore expressed amazement with their success, which helped shape a more positive outlook on his abilities.
Neo Anderson traveled from afar to attend this program at CNCC. He shared his experience, saying, “I was looking forward to being on campus and being able to get some real teamwork down, it was pretty cool, watching other people work, chipping in, learning a few things here and there, and it also felt good to be asked and relied upon for some quick access information. And also help research when the competition required something that was out of our scope, scraping and collecting information required to understand and solve a question with the team. My main takeaway is that working with people is much more productive than being by yourself when approaching large projects/objectives; everyone knows a little something and that something can be used to achieve our goals.”
“This competition was a lot of fun, and when I found out we were going to be participating in it, I was pumped and ready to get started,” said Jesse Aitken, who also thanked program leader Dr. Bobby WIlliams by declaring, “A large part of us doing so well in this competition is because of what I have learned in this cybersecurity program and the teacher pushing us to better ourselves today for a better tomorrow. So, I would like to end this by giving a huge thank you and a shout-out to our coach and teacher, Bobby Williams, for believing in us and pushing us to new heights; we couldn’t have done it without you.”
Colby Stene shared his experience with the individual competition, “For instance, in the Individual games, the hardest part is able to ask for help from colleagues or my coach, but that gave me the opportunity to see how I can grow and achieve on my own. The tenacity of learning how to push past obstacles, in other words, just knuckle down and get it done to achieve the unexpected, was very rewarding.”
The official individual competition numbers are in the top area of the graphic below. The official team competition numbers are in the bottom grouping. As a result, two teams in the competition ranked in the top 5% in the national competition, and the third team ranked in the top 10%. “Unbelievable!” Exclaimed CNCC program leader Dr. Bobby Williams, who is very proud of his students.
Special to the Herald Times
