Throughout my time at UWF once a semester I compete on behalf of the UWF Cyber Club in the National Cyber League and I have also represented the club for the Cyberseed competition. In these competitions I worked with a team to complete CTFs covering a large variety of topics. These topics include open source intelligence, password cracking, encryption, web app hacking, log analysis, network traffic and forensics. Through these competitions I have enhanced my skills in each of these topics as well as helped teach my teammates in my upperclassmen years when I was leading the teams. Thanks to my team and my own effort we were almost always able to place within the top 10% in the nation each time we competed.

While Hivestorm is still a CTF like NCL and Cyberseed it is different enough to talk about it here. This competition is once a year and team only unlike NCL. Competitors are given 4 virtual machines 2 windows and 2 linux that are vulnerable and are tasked with fixing as many mistakes on them ass possible in the given time frame. This involves removing malware and unwanted programs to deleting users and managing administrators. This competition tests your knowledge of a windows or linux environment as you try to spot anything that is out of place for a couple more points. Each time I competed I was able to get a little bit better at knowing where to look and not get stuck like last time. Since this competition is more about knowing where to look when you have no idea what to do google is allowed but anyone with google and no knowledge of the environment is bound to fall short. Overall this competition helped me get a lot more comfortable as an administrator in both windows and linux.

While the other cybersecurity competitions were tests of my cybersecurity skills and knowledge, CCDC operates on a whole new level. This competition has you and a team of 7 other people as admins coming to secure a network from possible attacks. While the virtual machines and network you are given aren't completely unsecured like Hivestorm from the beginning, it doesn't stay that way for long. While you are ensuring all of your services are running for points professional red teamers are running scripts against your defenses and are increasing the potency of these attacks each time they come back. While at first having one server down feels terrible as you see all of the points you are missing out on, by the end of the competition having one of your 8 servers running feels like a miracle. This simulation of a real cyber attack against an unprepared network is the worst possible thing that could happen to any company in the real world and the competition prepares students to ensure that doesn't happen in the first place.