Northeastern Cyber Defense Team Places 2nd in Northeast Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition

A medium-​​sized health insur­ance com­pany fires its IT staff, citing gross incom­pe­tence, and then hires a new team to defend its net­work against a band of highly skilled hackers looking for pri­vate data.

This sim­u­lated sce­nario played out at the 12th annual North­east Col­le­giate Cyber Defense Com­pe­ti­tion, held last month in Syra­cuse, New York.

Stu­dents from 10 schools—including North­eastern Uni­ver­sity, Cham­plain Col­lege, and the Rochester Insti­tute of Technology—assumed respon­si­bility of the health care company’s IT oper­a­tions. For three days, they were chal­lenged to mit­i­gate attacks against the organization’s data; respond to busi­ness requests; and main­tain the company’s oper­a­tional needs, from e-​​mail to e-​​commerce.

Northeastern’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in the com­pe­ti­tion dove­tailed with the university’s focus on solving global chal­lenges in secu­rity, one of the university’s three main research themes. (Cyber­at­tacks rep­re­sent one of the 21st-century’s grand chal­lenges, costing the global economy more than one hun­dred bil­lion dol­lars per year).

“Com­peting in this event is one of the coolest things I’ve ever done at North­eastern,” said Alex Interrante-​​Grant, E’18, the cap­tain of Northeastern’s cyber defense team. “It’s a great oppor­tu­nity for anyone who’s inter­ested in cyber­se­cu­rity work.”

The expe­ri­en­tial learning oppor­tu­nity proved invalu­able for Northeastern’s team, which placed second in the com­pe­ti­tion. One of the biggest chal­lenges required the North­eastern stu­dents to draw on the hacking skills honed in weekly team drills to thwart attacks from real-​​word cyberde­fense experts.

Team founder and coach Kevin Amorin noted that his squad of IT whizzes is often asked to assume the pro­to­typ­ical hacker’s mindset, attacking vir­tual envi­ron­ments in sim­u­lated sce­narios and then safe­guarding the sys­tems against future strikes. “We spend time thinking and acting like hackers in order to better under­stand how to defend,” said Amorin, a part-​​time lec­turer in the Col­lege of Com­puter and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence who teaches a course on net­work secu­rity prac­tices. “In this com­pe­ti­tion, we have industry-​​level hackers going after the team for close to 20 hours, so we need to be able to iden­tify what they’re doing if we want to stop it.”

His teaching methods have served his team well. Since founding the group in 2008, his cyber­squad has twice won the North­east regionals and beat out more than 80 uni­ver­si­ties for the national title in 2010.

Interrante-​​Grant, a second-​​year com­puter engi­neering major, noted that his expe­ri­ence in the group has inspired him to apply for the Cyber­Corps: Schol­ar­ship for Ser­vice pro­gram at North­eastern, which aims to edu­cate stu­dents in infor­ma­tion assur­ance and cybersecurity.

“I’m def­i­nitely inter­ested in a career in cyber­se­cu­rity research,” said Interrante-​​Grant, who is cur­rently applying his cyber defense skills to his co-​​op work at the Raytheon Com­pany. “Cyber­se­cu­rity is one of the most inter­esting areas in tech­nology because new traps come up every single day.”