Competing at CCDC Regionals
Our University of Arkansas team got a lot of experience competing at CCDC regionals. For a lot of the team members, this was there first time in a high-pressure environment dealing with real-world technology.
The competition was two 10-hour days where the Walmart read team, a team of professional good-guy hackers, would try to break into our systems and we had to keep them out. There were no breaks, and the competition was designed to generate as much stress as possible in the short amount of time allotted. This was done by having misconfigured systems, people walking into the room to make other requests that had to be done quickly, and a CEO that would come and yell at use when things weren’t online.
The competition served as a great learning experience for everyone because they had to learn new technologies in an unfamiliar environment under a time constraint. We had people on our team that new each platform (Windows, Linux, Mac, Firewalls, and VMWare ESXi) and put their skills to use. I would recommend anyone interested in security to join a team and compete because it provides a great starting point for technologies and skills to learn in preparation of the real world.