Kirkwood student team pits wits and skills against dozens of two/four-year schools in Ames, Mar 5-6
For five Kirkwood Community College students and their instructor-advisors, March 5 and 6 will be showdown days on a national level. Kirkwood’s Cyber Defense Team did well enough in late December competition to move on to a nationwide contest that weekend.
The coast-to-coast competition will actually take them back to where it all began, the Iowa State University campus in Ames. After earning second place honors against most of the community colleges in Iowa, the Kirkwood cyber-defenders will test their skills against top two- and four-year schools from across the U.S.
Kirkwood IT Instructor Dominic Audia says the team gets put through a lot of action during the contest, guarding against hackers of instant messaging, e-mail and Web servers.
“They will spend those two days doing their best to protect against a lot of cyber-threats,” said Audia, who teaches at Kirkwood’s Iowa City campus. “They also get graded on usability. The students have to make it usable and functional. Often, employees at companies have little computer experience.”
Kirkwood’s Cyber Defense student team consists of Chris Haman, John Moore, Dan Conner, Nick Covington and Chad Smith. For some of the students, the sophistication of computer networks, firewalls and the like is familiar territory. Haman, 20, took part in the Cisco Career Academy during his prep years at Iowa City High, where he graduated in 2007. He also supports his Kirkwood college studies as a technician for the U.S. Geological Survey.
Since winning the state-level competition the Kirkwood team has been preparing for the early March contests, using equipment at both the Cedar Rapids and Iowa City campuses. Jim Thompson teaches LAN networking classes in Cedar Rapids and says the team “deals with what gets thrown at them” during the contest.
“The students have spent about a month working on preparations for this competition. They know that the opposition teams will assault their networks with a wide variety of attacks and attempts to infiltrate their data. This is all based on real-world hacker attempts, phishing and related threats. They will come out of this with really rich experiences they can transfer to on-the-job expertise,” Thompson added.
More information on Kirkwood’s Cyber Defense teams and related classroom experience are available from Thompson in Kirkwood’s Business & IT department: [email protected]