On March 23, UConn Cyber placed second out of 165 teams in CyberSEED, a national cybersecurity competition hosted by the University of Connecticut. The team, ERROR 404, was composed of the club’s president Anthony Crisci, Vice President Robert Stawarz and Treasurer Ronak Sahu, and earned 2290 points out of a possible 2400 at the competition.
CyberSEED is a “Capture the Flag” cybersecurity competition hosted annually by UConn and gives teams a variety of cybersecurity challenges to work on to battle for the top spot. These challenges include “reverse engineering, web application security, network traffic analysis, cryptography and more”, according to CyberSEED’s website. UConn Cyber has competed in CyberSEED previously, but has never placed second before, which earned them a prize of $2500.
In an emailed response the members of ERROR 404 talked about their experience with UConn Cyber and the competition.
“We beat colleges with way better Cybersecurity funding, courses, and just generally way better Cybersecurity programs than UConn. It feels good and hopefully helps bring more attention to, in my opinion, one of, if not the most important area of technology,” Crisci said. “Cybersecurity doesn’t get much love from UConn in general (funding, courses, etc.) so still being able to perform how we did just re-enforces our motivation to continue the club, continue learning on our own, and continue spreading our message of Cybersecurity importance.”
One aspect of CyberSEED is the “incident report presentation.” For this presentation, teams are given a prompt and are tasked with finding out what went wrong and giving a presentation on how the team uncovered it to a panel of cybersecurity professionals who act as judges. They are tasked with finding out “the threat level, business solutions, and people who need to know about this so that the damage is as minute as possible and more,” according to Sahu.
Cybersecurity doesn’t get much love from UConn in general (funding, courses, etc.) so still being able to perform how we did just re-enforces our motivation to continue the club, continue learning on our own, and continue spreading our message of Cybersecurity importance.
Anthony Crisci, President of the UConn Cyber club
Sahu talked about how, before the incident report, their team was placed fourth on the leaderboard, and they were expecting their overall score to go down after the report.
“In CyberSeed 2023 we got 110/300 [on the incident report] which was making me think that our rank was going to go down from fourth pretty bad,” Sahu wrote. “But after the eighth team’s score was released, it was really exciting to see that our team was not getting called up and we all were excited to know that we placed second and that we got 280/300 in the incident report briefing.”
On April 5, UConn Cyber will compete in their next competition, the National Cyber League. UConn Cyber placed first at NCL in 2023, and they’re hoping to carry that into this year’s NCL along with their second-place finish at CyberSEED.
UConn Cyber is free to all students and meets from 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. on Wednesdays. They strive to provide opportunities for hands-on experience, professional development and community service to all members. For more information, you can visit UConn Cyber’s UConntact.