Cybersecurity Blog

On March 2nd, Sharon Flategraff, Director of Cyber Threat Intelligence at Mastercard, presented a seminar on cyber threat intelligence. She provided an overview of what cyber threat intelligence is and the role it plays in helping organizations identify and respond to potential cyber threats. Flategraff also shared insights from her professional experience, giving a practical perspective on the field.

The seminar, hosted by the Sigma Zeta Honor Society, highlighted the importance of cybersecurity and offered a valuable look into careers and practices within cyber threat intelligence.

Thanks to Katie for providing this post!

The Cybersecurity Education Program hosted a breakfast event with local Naval Supply Systems Command (NAVSUP) representatives for our students in cybersecurity, computer science and business.  NAVSUP employees Kevin Davis, Juwan Johnson and Thomas Kalafsky spoke with the students about internship and career opportunities at  NAVSUP facilities in nearby Mechanicsburg.

Students learned about how NAVSUP maintains the IT infrastructure in the Navy’s supply chains, applies cybersecurity fundamentals in everything from testing and building a product to reading and updating policies, and ensures logistics systems are operational.

We look forward to continued opportunities for our students to work with NAVSUP as interns and full-time employees!

On Saturday, January 17, 2026, the Messiah University Cybersecurity Competition Team participated in the Mid-Atlantic Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (MACCDC) regional qualifier.  This virtual cyber defense competition determines which teams advance to the in-person regional event held in the Baltimore area.

MACCDC is an “inherit-and-defend” style competition in which teams are given a simulated business production environment, complete with the systems and services found in a real organization.  Teams must quickly assess and harden these systems before attackers (the “red team”) attempt to compromise them.  In addition to technical defense, participants operate as a legitimate business—responding to operational requests, maintaining service availability, and writing professional business memos to and from a simulated executive leadership team.

This year, Messiah University’s team was comprised of Chris, Brandon, Ryan, Austin, Michael, Eli, Isaac, and Harley.  The team is coached by Dr. David Bibighaus.

We are proud to share that Messiah University placed in the top eight of the regional qualifiers while competing against 16 teams, including many large Division I institutions.  This placement advances our team to the in-person regional competition on March 27–28.

This accomplishment reflects the team’s hard work and dedication, as well as the continued growth of Messiah University’s Cybersecurity Program. The team looks forward to building on this experience as they prepare for future competitions.

This November, Messiah University’s Cyber Competition Team participated in the weekend-long National Cyber League (NCL) competition. With increasing turnout to our cybersecurity club this year, students decided to split into two teams to allow all to compete. The first team, competing with 2 upperclassmen and 4 underclassmen, started on Friday and met up Saturday evening to work on the challenges together. The second team, competing with 3 upperclassmen, worked periodically throughout the weekend and met for many hours on Sunday.

As the event concluded on Sunday evening, the team gathered for a recap meeting. Messiah’s team of 7 completed close to 75% of all challenges and placed in the top 5% of all teams. Meanwhile, Messiah’s team of 3 completed close to 45% of all challenges and placed lower. Each student mentioned enjoying the competition and finding it a challenging learning experience. The team’s cyber skills were sharpened in various areas such as cryptography, traffic analysis, web app exploitation and more.

Coming up for the Messiah team is the annual Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) held during spring semester, as well as the NCAE Cyber Games.  Students have prepared this past fall and will be coordinating quickly after coming back to get ready for qualifiers. The team is excited to introduce new talent to the competition environment and continue learning new skills. Stay tuned for updates!

Thanks to Ryan, junior cyber student, for writing this post.

We were honored to host Jim Gale, Lead Cyber Security Research Consultant at Wells Fargo Bank, on campus last week!

He shared with our cybersecurity students valuable insights into threat hunting practices and his research on the DPRK’s remote IT worker threat. Our students walked away with a deeper understanding of how global adversaries are evolving — and how industry leaders are responding.

Opportunities like this bridge the gap between classroom learning and the real-world challenges cyber professionals face every day.

A huge thank you to Jim for investing in the next generation of cyber defenders!

Our summer cyber lab project wrapped up with great success as our two student lab techs, Austin and Brandan, spent 10 weeks working full-time to bring the new grant-funded cyber range to life. They built out Proxmox servers, set up workstations, configured a Ubiquiti smart switch, and brought a new NAS online. Along the way, they also installed and tuned key services like Guacamole, Graylog, pfSense, and VaultWarden—giving the range powerful new capabilities. Beyond the technical build, they wrote documentation and created scripts so the environment is now ready to support fall courses and competition team training. Their work not only strengthened our infrastructure but also gave them invaluable, real-world experience in system administration, networking, and collaborative project work. Thanks to their efforts, the cyber range is now well-positioned to become a great resource for cybersecurity education at Messiah University. The grant also provides funding for student lab techs in the upcoming academic year, so look for more exciting news coming soon.

We had the pleasure of once again hosting high school students for our annual Cyber Camp on June 9-12! Twenty-four students from Pennsylvania and Maryland came to learn about the foundations of cybersecurity and to get a small taste of college life on Messiah’s campus.

This year, we had several special guests join us from the cybersecurity industry. Representatives from the Navy Business Systems Center in Mechanicsburg joined us to talk about opportunities in the DOD. Jobe Beckhom, Associate Director of Ediscovery, DFIR and Cybersecurity at Verizon, spoke to us about risk and incident response. Director of Threat Intelligence at Mastercard, Sharon Flategraff, led us in a KC7 cyber gaming challenge. Allen Snook, Director of Information Security at Messiah University, gave us a tour of the Security Operations Center, where our interns work each semester gaining real-world cybersecurity experience. Allen was joined by several of our cybersecurity students, who spoke to us about their experience working in the SOC and guided us through several Graylog exercises to find network intruders.  Vinny Sakore, Vice President at Arete, spoke to campers about threat actors and ransomware.

The students seemed to enjoy hearing from our guests, learning new concepts such as C-I-A, Linux, python, threats, online safety, cryptography, firewalls and more, and working on fun cyber gaming challenges. The games were a big hit, and proved to be a great way to expand students’ understanding of the concepts taught. We are already planning for more gaming challenges for next year, as well as other things to make Cyber Camp 2026 even more successful!

Thank you to all our students from Cyber Camp 2025 – you were what made this camp so great. We enjoyed spending time with you and we look forward to seeing how cybersecurity plays a role in your path moving forward. Thanks also to the parents for your support of us and of the students.

Enjoy photos from this year’s camp!

On Sunday, March 16, 2025, younger members of Messiah University’s Cybersecurity Competition Team participated in the National Centers of Academic Excellence (NCAE) Cyber Games. This particular competition is designed for first-time competitors and is meant to introduce the typical competition environment, mirroring many aspects of the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) including the “inherit and defend” style competition where competitors harden vulnerable systems and maintain their secure status as the competition progresses. In addition to scoring points for infrastructure and keeping various services online, this competition also provided the team with capture-the-flag (CTF) style challenges, requiring the use of skills ranging from network scanning to binary exploitation.

Messiah had just one team of 4 members: Brielle, Gabe, Harley and Noah. This was the first experience any of these students had with a cybersecurity competition and they all walked away with valuable information about a variety of topics they are excited to learn more about. Competing against other institutions with larger teams, Messiah’s team performed well. They were able to complete two-thirds of the CTF challenges and managed to get and keep several services online during the competition.

Through competing in this event, the four Messiah students learned a lot about system infrastructure and networking, as well as being able to enhance their skills with Linux operating systems. The team was grateful for the opportunity to participate in the competition and between interacting with NCAE staff and each other they each grew substantially in their technical skills and their teamwork. The team is eager to continue learning and is excited to see what future competitions have in store for them.

Thanks to Harley for providing the summary.