Cyber Defense Organization

Get Hands-on Cyber Defense Experience!

What is CDO?

The Cyber Defense Organization at Davenport University is a community of security-focused individuals pursuing knowledge in cyber security and threat mitigation throughout the private and public sectors.

Through various competitions and events sponsored by Cyber Defense Organization and College of Technology, you can begin or continue your participation in Cyber Security opportunities.

CDO was started in 2009 by Anthony Giallombardo (President), Alan Herriman (Vice President), and Austin Downing (Treasurer).

Who can join CDO?

The Registered Student Academic Organization is open to all students!

Competition Overviews:

Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition

Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition also known as CCDC is the largest college-level cyber defense competition in the world according to the National CCDC [6]. On June 29, 2010, United States House Legislation [7] passed recognizing the National CCDC for promoting cyber security curriculum.

Davenport University is a part of the Midwest Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (MWCCDC) region, which includes Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin. The Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) is designed to put students in a foreign situation, which will simulate entering a company without any prior knowledge of the network. Students must familiarize themselves with the new system as quickly as possible in order to start patching and protecting their networks against the onslaught of the red team attacks. In the end, the goal of each team is to keep their business’ services up and accessible during these attacks.

During this event which lasts three days, students focus on keeping resources of a network operational, while protecting their existing network infrastructure. While the event is running team members will have an opportunity to interact with professionals in the network security industry, while at the same time testing their knowledge in a working environment.

The objective of CCDC is to help bring benefits to both the students involved, and to the corporations that many of these graduates will go on to work with. More importantly, CCDC helps provide schools with the feedback needed to provide the best possible security and information technology curriculum.

You can find a list of the competition rules and more in-depth overview by visiting the National CCDC website [6].

Where does Davenport University Currently Stand?

Recently, 2011, Davenport University took second place at the state level, which advanced us to the regional level.  You can continue reading more information about the news release on the Davenport University Student News [8].

The DC3 [9] is both an individual and team based competition based around helping create cyber professionals, build relationships within the Digital Forensics Community and help to create new tools, techniques, and methodologies for the Digital Forensic Community.

Through the forensics challenge, you will help create better methods for digital forensics, multimedia lab services, while increasing cyber technical training, researching, testing, and evaluating the capabilities of those supporting cyber counterintelligence and counter-terrorism for the Department of Defense.

This is designed to help provide the Department of Defense with superiority in the mission space using technical innovation. At the same time, the Department of Defense would like to help create a higher standard for digital forensics within the criminal investigative, counterintelligence, and counter-terrorism community.

This year’s competition will focus on 23 scenario-based objectives with increasing levels of difficult to help foster new tools, techniques, and methodologies for the digital forensics community to use in the future.

The DC3 competition focuses around multiple levels of objects starting with level 100 challenges such as Windows Registry Analysis, and File signature identification, and moving on up to level 500 challenges designed to help participants create new tools to complete objectives such as creating a program to read MFT’s, and creating a tool to image an Android based system. Based on the difficulty of the completed assignment teams or individuals will earn points that will be tallied in the end to determine the victor in a number of categories.

For more information, please visit http://www.dc3.mil/challenge/2011/ [10] .

Cyber Defense Organization through different competitions offer experience and networking opportunities with the following, but not limited:

Interested in CDO?

Contact Student Life Office,  email at cdorg@email.davenport.edu [11], or connect on Facebook [5] to get involved!