Professional hackers from across the nation will be in Ames this weekend, putting 215 IoSU students to the test.

Saturday will mark the annual Cyber Defense Competition, which will be hosted from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. in Coover Hall. 

Doug Jacobson, director of Information Assurance Center and university professor of electrical and computer engineering, said the competition will consist of four different teams: white, blue, green and red. 

The white team consists of individuals who run and manage the competition and scoring.

The blue team will be students who created the network that individuals would see in the real-world corporate environment. The blue team will be judged on the usability of the site, the services the website provides, anomalies and reports on how their system has been set up. 

“[Anomalies] represent random things that happen on a daily basis as a computer administrator,” said Matthew Schlue, graduate student in electrical and computer engineering. “The white team administers anomalies, [such as] adding file servers or having to delete a profile.”

The green team will be the individuals who actually use the systems. The members will use their email account and browse the website, making sure it is usable.

Lastly, the red team is the hackers. Their job will be to look for places where the blue team misconfigured their server or didn’t patch security vulnerability, leading to a break in.

Professional security personnel from Boeing, an aerospace company, and PricewaterhouseCoopers, an international auditing and consulting company, as well as ISU alumni will be among the various hackers. 

Teams will be composed of six to 10 students who have created a scenario or story of an organization that they are in charge of keeping safe from hackers. The teams have had about three weeks to design and build the network system, install servers and build this scenario. 

At this year’s competition the scenario will model a financial website that sells products, like Amazon. The goal will be to keep the customer data from being leaked.

The competition this year will be the largest one in the event’s history. 

“Last year’s fall competition had 150 students,” Jacobson said. 

The Cyber Defense Competition at Iowa State is quite different from competitions held elsewhere across the nation. Schlue said Iowa State’s focus is on the realistic measure rather than the students simply defending against the hackers.

At Iowa State, students will experience hacking events fellow students and graduates have experienced or seen at various jobs or internships. 

The competition is open to all majors. Participants vary from freshmen to graduate students.

“[The day of] is very chaotic, which is intentional,” Jacobson said. “We are cramming 200 students into one room. It creates a party atmosphere.”

Jacobson said the competition is a time and place for all participants to learn something and gain knowledge no matter how many times they have competed in the competition. Employers like to see students participate in events like the Cyber Defense Competition, Jacobson said.

“Companies have found that those students who participate our Cyber Defense Competitions and getting these real-world experiences are more skilled and knowledgeable when going into their internship,” Schlue said. 

The event is made possible by the Internet-Scale Event and Attack Generation Environment and the Information Assurance Center.