The University of Florida Student Information Security Team (UFSIT) has had a successful semester with a second-place finish in U.S. Southeast Regional Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition (CPTC) and a third-place finish in the Department of Energy Cyberforce competition.
The UFSIT Collegiate Penetration Testing Team finished second in the CPTC on October 14, 2023. The team previously won the regional competition in 2021 and participated in the global competition in Rochester, NY. The UF team will compete again at the global CPTC January 12 through January 14, along with 13 other teams.
The competition combines technical, communication and collaboration skills in a simulated evaluation of a company’s computing resources.
“Technical knowledge and skill are applied to identify security weaknesses in the company’s computational environment. Communication involves both written and oral reports to both technical and non-technical audiences,” said Joseph Wilson, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering and the group’s faculty sponsor. “Successful teams have members who collaborate effectively to address all these challenges in a very limited time frame.”
This year’s simulated company was an airport including controls for smart terminals, trains, and airplanes.
UFSIT also competed as “Darth Gator” in the DoE Cyberforce competition hosted by Argonne National Laboratory and placed third out of 94 teams. The competition required students to act as the technical team at a distributed energy resource management company. Their job was to keep services functioning while keeping attackers at bay. They were required to integrate, maintain, and secure all internal information services and remote client management software. Some of the systems that required defense had already been breached by attackers, adding a second layer of difficulty to this challenge.
If you would like to learn more about UFSIT you can visit their website at https://ufsit.club.
By Drew Brown
Marketing and Communications Specialist