Ben Heise and UMUC Team Places in Top Three of National Cybersecurity Competition
University of Maryland University College (UMUC) announced today that a team of its undergraduate cybersecurity students, including one resident from Aberdeen, placed third out of 53 teams at The MITRE Corporation’s 2012 Capture the Flag (CTF) Cyber Challenge, held July 9–10. The competition, which was open to undergraduate and high school students, drew entries from across the country, with teams from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo (1st place), the University of South Florida (2nd place), Carnegie Mellon University (4th place) and the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (5th place) rounding out the top five finishers.
The UMUC Cyber team, “Padawans”, was comprised four students, including John Arneson, Benjamin Heise (Aberdeen resident), Armando Quintananieves and Justin Wray. The team was led by Dr. Jeff Tjiputra, academic director of Cybersecurity and Computer Networks & Security in UMUC’s Undergraduate School; UMUC alumnus Chris Kuehl served as the team’s technical advisor. The two-day, 20-hour online competition consisted of a series of challenges with varying degrees of difficulty in cyber-related categories such as computer networking, cryptography, forensics, reverse engineering and Web server exploitation.