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Cyber Defense Competition Has A New Champion
lisah writes "Several colleges across the country went head-to-head in San Antonio, Texas last weekend at the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition to see which team could best protect their networks against attacks. In a modern day version of Steal the Flag, the teams duked it out using identical network setups that included a Cisco router and five servers. In the end, Baker College took the champion's title from last year's winner, Texas A & M University."
Usually competitions like this are in "Which OS is most secure" kinds of settings, where the ostensible purpose is to find out which OS is the most secure. However, in this case, you had you had a bunch of different OSs all linked together, and you had to protect them from a bunch of security professionals. I imagine these "pros" probably weren't hard-core hackers, and given that, I'm not sure what the value of the exercise was. These pros won't have anything in their arsenal that everybody doesn't already know about it (at least, if they're studying computer security, they *ought* to know about it), and so we're basically left with (and this is something the article mentions) a bunch of people changing their conf files as fast as possible. If you ask me, they should six Eastern Europeans and North Koreans, and offer them $10,000 for every box they own. If the teams box doesn't get owned, they get the ten grand. Simpler, more interesting, and far more realistic.
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