Competition Skills

March 3, 2023

A cyber team from Dakota State University is headed to a national competition.

Eight students competed in the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) in February and won in the At Large region event. April 28-30, they will compete against nine other teams from across the country in the National CCDC competition.

CCDC was created in 2005 to establish a cyber security exercise for post-secondary students. The intent was to bring the worlds of operations and education together to better prepare graduates for the future.

“While CCDC is definitely gamified, almost all of the skills that we learn and train here are very applicable to the real world,” said team captain Gaelin Shupe, a Master of Science in Cyber Defense major from Boulder, Colo.

For the competition, teams work with a simulated business, providing IT services while fending off attackers, called red teamers, which are meant to disrupt those services. Further, teams must work to resolve “injects,” or assigned tasks that might involve technical or business-oriented skills.

Each student brings a variety of skills necessary to find and fix vulnerabilities and methods to detect and stop malicious actors, Shupe said. With this, the team can assign roles based on those capabilities, such as defensive experience with Linux or Windows, or business experience for injects. Depending on where they are in the competition, team members have to be agile on that day, said Jackson Heiberger, a Cyber Operations and Network Security and Administration double major from Beresford, S.D.

To be prepared for any situation, “every team member is expected to be practicing technical skills on their own outside of our weekly trainings,” said Shupe.

“We all need to take the initiative to learn what will help us win the competition, and what will help us tackle any challenge that the competition throws our way,” he stated, including quick analysis and prioritization during incidents to the professional communication skills required.

Leadership skill is another advantage of this team competition. Shupe is in his fourth year on the team, and being team captain “has provided me personally with a great opportunity to learn team leadership, communication, and organization skills.” He organizes and leads their weekly meetings, sets up practice/training exercises to build the team's technical skills, helps to resolve internal conflicts, and works on some of the challenges that come with training on communication and teamwork skills for the whole team.

The 2023 team members include:  

• Aaron Baker, Cyber Operations major from Sheridan, Wyo.
• John Brumels, Cyber Operations and Network Security and Administration double major from Sioux Falls, S.D.
• Jonny Derenge, Cyber Operations from Sioux Falls, S.D.
• Jackson Heiberger, Cyber Operations and Network Security and Administration double major from Beresford, S.D.
• Annabelle Klosterman, Master of Science in Cyber Defense major from Brandon, S.D.
• Gaelin Shupe, Master of Science in Cyber Defense major from Boulder, Colo.
• Tristan Stapert, Cyber Operations from Tumwater, Wash.
• Tyler Thomas, Cyber Operations and Network Security and Administration double major from Forest Lake, Minn.

Alternates for the CCDC team are: Gwen Vongkasemsiri, Michael Fahnlander, and Tyler Sternod.