For over 14 years the Michigan Collegiate Cyber Defense Network has been providing industry sponsored and executed cyber defensive events. These events have led Michigan college teams to a new level in academic expectations. Each year a state qualifier and assessment is conducted by industry personnel from various organizations. The objective is to find the highest qualified student academic team, with the best prepared industry candidates. As the intensity and number of academic institutions have increased over the years, so have the skills required to participate, resulting in raising the bar of academic programs across the state as well. The product of this entire process is some of the highest quality graduates in the field of cyber defense. Participants in these events are categorized into teams. They include:
Design and Integration Team
This team is responsible for the pre-planning phase of the event. They determine the intensity of all activities before the event begins. They are responsible for determining the network topology while taking into account everything from equipment availability and integration, operating system configuration and build, scheduling, type and deployment of adverse event implementation, creation of the service inject pool that will be issued to blue team members, delivery environment, and the method of electronic service monitoring and scoring. The design and integration team are network engineers and security experts with extensive experience.
Chief Judge
The chief judge is an industry expert in networking and security and is responsible for overseeing equitable distribution of all activities, including the verification and validation of the final results of all score tallies and reports. The chief judge may serve in the role of competition director during the event.
Administration Team
The Administration Team operates the execution phase of all activities. These are industry professionals who conduct the real-time operations of event activities, including electronic monitoring and scoring. Positions within the administration team include the competition director, assistant director, and the chief judge.
Compliance Monitor
The compliance monitor serves only in the role during the event as certifying all the rules of the event have been followed and the equality of events have been consistent as possible. The compliance monitor cannot serve in a scoring or judging role but can rule on the validity and integrity of a decision that may come into question.
White Team
This team is the backbone of the execution phase of the event. They are industry experts that serve in the roles of network and security engineers and are responsible for serving as service score compilers, network support, and operate the electronic service monitoring and scoring systems. They keep the event running.
Red Team
Members of the red team are industry experts whose sole purpose is to assess each blue team network for vulnerabilities and compromise those networks wherever and whenever they can. This team is located both on-site and in remote locations. They use commonly used penetration tools and techniques as well as those of their own specially crafted design.
Blue Team(s)
These are the students who represent various academic institutions competing in the cyber defense qualifier and assessment activities. Their roles are to defend their networks against cyber attack while maintaining services, monitoring network traffic, responding to administration team required service and network changes, incident response and identifying the difference between production and malicious traffic or events. They are enrolled into a networking or cyber security program and represent their academic institution. There are up to eight active blue team members.
Green Team
Green team members are those who provide support to all the other teams by delivering equipment, act as runners and registration assistants. These may be industry personnel or students of the hosting institution.
Some of our cyber defense qualifier events have benefited from presentations from various organizations including the Turkish National Police, the USSS, FBI, State of Michigan Department of Technology, Brazilian security firm, and the Cyber Security Forum Initiative, as well as other local and state companies, organizations and academic institutions.