On Saturday, January 18, 2025, the Messiah University Cybersecurity Competition Team participated in the Mid-Atlantic Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition regional qualifier—a virtual cyber competition that determines qualification for the in-person event in the DC area. The competition is an “inherit and defend” style event where teams are given a simulated business production environment, complete with all the systems a real business would have. They must harden the systems quickly before attackers attempt to break in. In addition to securing systems, the team functions as a legitimate business, responding to tasks, and writing business memos to and from the C-suite while keeping all systems online.
This year, Messiah had one team competing, comprised of Chris, Brandon, Carolina, Austin, Ryan, Michael, Eli and Ben. The team demonstrated significant growth over last year, particularly in communication, task distribution, system administration skills, and incident response. However, they identified room for improvement in firewall configurations and managing mail servers. The team is coached by Dr. David Bibighaus.
We are proud to share that Messiah University’s team placed in the upper third of the competition while competing against large Division I schools with significant resources. This qualifies us to compete at a higher level in the in-person regional competition, which will be held March 21st–22nd. This achievement reflects the team’s hard work and dedication, as well as Messiah’s growing Cybersecurity Program. The team looks forward to building on this experience as they prepare for future competitions for many years to come.
Thank you to Chris for this recap… and way to go, team!
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