A team of Syracuse University graduate students were recently honored at a national cyber challenge.

The group of students, from the School of Information Studies and the College of Engineering and Computer Science, took home the gold award in Phase I of the National Cyber Analyst Challenge.

The students included Michael Hartley, Siddhesh Wadikar, Yicheng Shen, Bilal Alsharifi and Benjamin Murray. They are all members of the iSchool’s Information Security Club. Bahram Attaie, an iSchool professor of practice, serves as the club’s coach and faculty adviser.

Hosted by two defense companies, Lockheed Martin and Leidos, and administrated by Temple University, the NCAC is an interdisciplinary competition for undergraduate and graduate students from top cyber-related programs in the country. Twenty schools participated in the first phase.

“Competitors were given a real world dataset of a cyber-attack, and they had to give a presentation reconstructing a timeline of the critical events in the attack,” Hartley said.

They were required to suggest recommendations to fix the situation, he added.

By participating in the competition and winning the gold award, the team of iSchool students received not only experience, but also a $12,000 award for group funding and training sessions.

It also enables them to advance to a future phase of competition to be hosted in Washington, D.C.

For that phase, taking place in Washington in late October, the team added Mark Edmiston, an undergraduate junior majoring in computer science and information management and technology. Edmiston and the rest of the team will represent SU in this final round for the first time. They expect to face a more difficult and completely different challenge than in the first phase, Hartley said.

The final round of NCAC will be a live competition, where students altogether will be put in the situation of an ongoing attack, Wadikar said. The opposing teams in this round will be proficient and experienced teams from top computer science and information study programs in the country, such as Carnegie Mellon University, University of Texas at San Antonio and Iowa State University, according to Barchart.com.

Despite it being their first time in the competition, with the provided mentors and resources, the team members of Syracuse University said they are confident. The winner of the final round of NCAC will receive an award of $25,000, according to Barchart.com. Additionally, there will be employers in attendance who will actively approach potential candidates and offer interview and employment opportunities, Wadikar said.

“I was very excited and honored,” Murray said about winning the competition.

Published on September 27, 2016 at 8:27 pm

Contact Kai: atnguyen@syr.edu