BSIT Students Host A Cyberdefense Competition for High School Students

A Bachelor of Science in Information Technology (BSIT) capstone team, comprised of four Jayhackers—Edwards officers, organized and held a cyberdefense competition over the course of a week this fall. The onsite portion of the competition was hosted at the KU Edwards Campus on October 19th and 20th. Competition participants included three high school teams and two teams that were made up of JCCC and BSIT students. Teams were given one week for offsite setup, one day of onsite setup, and one day for the attack phase of the competition. The onsite setup time was to give students the opportunity to ask the organizers last minute questions and to further secure their environments, while completing puzzles and building their soft skills.

The teams were given an environment of servers and workstations, with various operating systems, misconfigurations and vulnerabilities. Their goal was to familiarize themselves with the environment, audit the network, then document and fix vulnerabilities. In the competition's scenario, competitors acted as consultants hired to secure the company's network and systems against possible attackers.

During the attack phase, Red Teamers, a mix of EECS students and industry professionals, were able to exploit a SQL injection vulnerability on the company's website, use default passwords and move throughout competitors' networks. Overall, most teams thoroughly secured their environments and did well with the various tasks and puzzles.

First place went to Lee's Summit West High School, followed by two Summit Technology Academy teams.