Event was the first time a Dunwoody team competed in a cyber challenge
On Saturday, Jan. 25, Cybersecurity students from Dunwoody College of Technology went head-to-head against nine other teams from Minnesota in the annual Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition Qualifier.
This was the first time a team from Dunwoody has competed in the event, which challenges students to build and defend mock business infrastructures and protect their systems from professional “hackers” who are tasked with taking them offline and breaching their security.
“As a first-time team, we didn’t really know what we were getting into because none of us had ever done anything like this before,” said team captain Nina Murphy, a fourth-year Cybersecurity student.
Despite the added challenge of competing for the first time, the team walked away with a Fourth-Place finish, a rarity for groups that are new to the competition scene. In addition to Murphy, the Dunwoody team consisted of students: Leighton Cole, Quinn Siebers, Levi Ingle, Evan Sambugaro, Espen Asper, Jack Pendergast, and Dominick Diego.
The Collegiate Cyber Defense Competitions (CCDC) are structured contests that allow students from higher education institutions to gain experience protecting an enterprise network while fending off cyber-attacks. During the competition, judges introduce additional network enhancement and upgrade challenges and assess the performance of the eight-person teams. Points are awarded based on ability to detect and respond to security incidents, maintain network services, and complete business tasks while under constant attack from the Red Team.
For the 2025 competition season, teams from the Midwest participated in invitations during November and December, which help them prepare for the Qualifier round.
The teams that finish first in the qualifiers will head to the regional competition in March, followed by a national competition in April.
Murphy said participating in the invitational event played a key role in the Dunwoody team’s success.
“The Invitational was in December and that was the most valuable learning experience leading up to the competition because we had an idea of what the network topologies were going to look like,” Murphy said. “At the time, our team wasn’t well formulated with roles and assignments.”
That changed after the Invitational, and the Dunwoody team spent a month and a half preparing and organizing. They assigned members to a firewall team and a software team, they chose someone to fill out the solutions, and created a chain of communication.
“At the invitational, you get scenarios live that are happening against your network and you have to trouble shoot, discuss with your team, and assign who is going to take it,” Murphy said. “Somone needs to write down the in-depth solution and submit that, while the team is also working on the network to fix it.”
All of their preparation paid off, and Murphy said the team was very happy with their performance at the Qualifier.
“We did really well for our first time,” she said. “It was a lot, but overall it was super fun. I really think at the end of it all, it came down to trusting each other. We knew what team was going to take [a challenge], and whose role was what.”
An Air Force veteran, Murphy said she hopes to apply her degree in the healthcare sector, eventually helping prevent things like ransomware attacks on hospital infrastructure.