The Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) is a blue-team competition set for college students to experience real-world scenarios in the cybersecurity field. CCDC is set to create a real-world environment where students are company administrators with a network of typically 50+ users, seven to ten servers, and common Internet services such as a web server and mail server.

After advancing from the qualifying round, we made the trip to Kennesaw State for regionals. The difference between the regional and the qualifier rounds is that the competition was split between two days. The first day of the competition was six hours, and the second was five plus awards.

Just like in qualifiers, each team had to keep as many of the services running as possible, with my job being the web server. I was able to learn more advanced security topics like using the Windows registry, as it proved to be a very important tool to my system, and how to communicate specific computer vulnerabilities and how they would affect a system to an audience of non-tech people.

Even though we did not advance to nationals, both rounds of the competition were a great experience for me. I was able to build on the skills I have learned not only from the competition itself but those that I have learned so far at UWF. Not only for the learning but also for the connections and networking everyone got to do.