Competition Prepares Students for Future in Cybersecurity

03/29/2023
By Brooke Coupal

Cybercriminals are lurking in the background, ready to pounce on the vulnerabilities of corporate networks.

On average, an organization experiences nearly 1,200 cyberattacks each week, with education, government and health care being the industries that were attacked the most in 2022, according to Check Point Research. 

The Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) gives college students the opportunity to practice fighting off these attacks. For the first time, UMass Lowell hosted the Northeast CCDC, welcoming students from 10 institutions across New England and New York.

“Cybersecurity is continuously evolving,” said Provost Joseph Hartman at the start of the three-day event, which was held at the UMass Lowell Inn and Conference Center. “Competitions like this get you ready for the real world.”

Each team worked with a cloud infrastructure that mimicked a small- to medium-sized company offering Software as a Service, which allows clients to use cloud-based applications over the internet.

“The idea is that this company can set up private infrastructures for their clients so that one client is not able to access the files of another client,” says Asst. Prof. Sashank Narain of the Miner School of Computer and Information Sciences, who served as the 2023 Northeast CCDC director and helped develop the competition infrastructure.

The student teams had to protect the infrastructure from hackers while completing tasks set forth by a group of executives, a challenge for which the UMass Lowell team spent months preparing in the university’s Cyber Range. The UML team consisted of coach Ian Chen, a Miner school assistant professor; computer science graduate students Chris Morales and Manoj Sarma Yeddanapudi; and computer science undergraduates Matthew Harper, Rosemarie O’Riorden, Andrew Allman, Andrew Bernal, Chisom Ukaegbu and Luke Aldrich. Graduate students Justin Marwad and Pranathi Rayavaram served as alternates for the team.

After day one, the UML team’s infrastructure had been badly compromised by hackers gaining access.

“I told the team not to panic when things go wrong,” says Morales, a Ph.D. student from Brockton, Massachusetts, who was UML’s team captain. “We created a recovery plan for the next day and made a huge comeback.”

“The first day was stressful,” adds Ukaegbu, a sophomore from Washington, D.C. “But during the second day of the competition, we felt and performed like an entirely different team.”

Northeastern University ended up winning the competition, but Narain says he felt proud of what the UMass Lowell team accomplished.

“I’ve never seen a better recovery than that,” says Narain, who previously served as the UML team coach from 2019 to 2022. “Every year, the UMass Lowell team becomes stronger.”

On the third day of the competition, students got to network and hear from a panel of industry experts, including Sam Curry ’96, chief information security officer at Zscaler; Harold Moss, CEO of Tautuk; Damon DePaolo, director of cyber security talent and education at MassMutual; and Edward Davis, CEO of The Edward Davis Company and former Boston police commissioner who led the response to the Boston Marathon bombing. Red Curry ’05, chief marketing officer at Tautuk, moderated the panel discussion.

“They lived through a lot of the major cybersecurity events, and it was really cool listening to their stories,” says O’Riorden, a junior from Stow, Massachusetts. “I hope I encounter something as interesting as they have in my future career.”

For Sarma Yeddanapudi, the event instilled in him the confidence to pursue a job in cybersecurity when he graduates.

“I got to interact with a lot of people from the industry who are considered the best, and the nuances of the field that they have spoken about really inspired me to work harder in this field,” he says.

Aldrich, a first-year student from Marlborough, Massachusetts, is already looking forward to next year’s Northeast CCDC.

“I’m planning to do the competition again and hopefully learn more about what technologies drive the difficult realm of cybersecurity,” he says.