Cyber Defense Club

The club’s main purpose is to provide students who are interested in cybersecurity with the more advanced technical skills and resources required to progress through their computer security careers.  To achieve the mission, the club will host monthly meetings where we discuss and practice hands-on cybersecurity concepts, including, but not limited to, network security, digital forensics, secure coding, cryptography, and reverse engineering.  On top of this, we will outreach to local companies and organizations to speak at our meetings and promote their work in computer security.

The club’s competition team will meet bi-weekly throughout the semester to prepare for competition in cyber security challenges, known as Capture the Flag (CTF) competitions.  The competition team is for students who are interested in learning the technical aspects of cybersecurity; in order to beat them, you must join them.  These challenges include, but are not limited:

National Cyber League Challenge (Online):  The NCL is a defensive and offensive puzzle-based, capture-the-flag style cybersecurity competition. Its virtual training ground helps high school and college students prepare and test themselves against cybersecurity challenges that they will likely face in the workforce.

ITENWired competition (Local):  Demonstrates advanced techniques developed through the Department of Defense to emulate the cybersecurity domain of the future.  ITENWired provides hands-on interaction with the Florida Cyber Range, which rapidly develops/validates the knowledge and skills needed for the protection of critical national infrastructure.

Cyberthon (Local):  CyberThon offers Northwest Florida unprecedented cybersecurity awareness and learning opportunity.    During this three‐day weekend, participants will be mentored through an understand of how attacks against process control systems could be launched, why they work, and provides mitigation strategies to increase cyber security awareness related to control systems networks.

“The PSC Cyber Defense team participated in Cyberthon 2018, a three‐day cybersecurity training and competition event that was themed around the power and energy sector.  They worked through Exploit Labs that replicated a real‐world scenario where a controller is monitoring and controlling devices deployed in the field. The team also in a Facebook’s Capture the Flag (CTF) gaming challenge, where they took 4^th out of 10 teams.  One of the team’s newest members cracked a 500-point cryptography challenge, alas with only 25 seconds on the clock; not enough time to get the question onto the game board, which would have bumped the team to 3^rd place.” -Karin Carters’