UCF’s cyber-warriors have done it again.
Team members from the Collegiate Cyber Defense Club @ UCF took first place in the Southeast Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition held this week at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. It’s the third consecutive year that UCF’s team has come out on top in the Southeast region.
The team will now travel to San Antonio on April 24-26 to compete in the Raytheon National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition against nine other regional winners.
Other teams will likely be gunning for the University of Central Florida in San Antonio, because UCF’s team is the defending national champion. That victory in 2014 earned team members a trip to the White House to meet Vice President Joe Biden.
It’s a busy month for UCF’s cyber-warriors. On Friday, they head to Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Wash., to participate in the computer and software giant’s “Build the Shield” competition for the first time.
At the Southeast competition on Tuesday and Wednesday, UCF also won two specialty awards: “Best in Business” for accurately completing the largest number of business injects of any team, and “Best in Service” for maintaining the highest overall system up-time of 92 percent. This year’s up-time score breaks the previous up-time record for the Southeast region, which was also set by UCF in 2013.
In winning the Southeast contest, the UCF team bested teams from the University of South Florida, University of North Carolina-Charlotte, University of North Carolina-Wilmington, College of Charleston, Georgia Regents University, Montreat College and Tennessee Technical University.
Members of this year’s team include: Carlos Beltran, Jason Cooper, Austin Brogle, Conner Brooks, Kevin Colley, Alex Davis, Nathaniel Dennis, Tyler Dever, Kevin DiClemente, Andres Giron, Jonathan Lundstrom and Shane Welch.