Stanford Applied Cybersecurity group wins national penetration testing competition

Stanford University took first place in the annual National Collegiate Pentesting Competition hosted Nov. 3–5 at RIT. In the competition, teams from 10 national universities were charged with attacking and analyzing a computer network.

The nation’s brightest cybersecurity college students traveled to Rochester, N.Y., to test their hacking skills in the annual National Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition. The Nov. 3–5 event allowed students to learn about penetration testing and offensive cybersecurity rather than defensive, which is the focus of the CCDC cyber defense competition. Teams from 10 national universities faced-off at RIT's B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, breaking into fabricated computer networks, evaluating their weak points and presenting plans to better secure them.

The event is sponsored by Uber, Crowe Horwath and IBM Security.

Stanford University took home the top trophy in the competition. The top teams were noted for their ability to verbalize, document in a written format and present their findings clearly to an audience that has a variety of technical understanding.