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.

The competition is split into regional rounds to determine the schools that advance to nationals. There were so many teams that wanted to compete in regionals that the Southeast region had a regional qualifier to see who would travel to Kennesaw State for the in-person regionals.

During the competition, each team has eight hours 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.

UWF finished in the top eight, qualifying us for the regional round. This competition was an excellent experience because it allowed me to continue my work from CyberPatriot and build on skills we have learned in the classroom that are necessary in the cybersecurity world.