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SIUC students battled through planted e-mails, compromised servers, broken firewalls and adrenaline, but it wasn't enough.
Eight SIUC students competed in the Illinois Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition at SIUC over the weekend. The team finished second in the contest, losing to DePaul University in Chicago.
Last year, SIUC won the event and placed fourth in the national competition.
The goal of the competition was to protect a network similar to that of a small business from attacking hackers while keeping it running. The competition was sponsored in part by National Science Foundation and the School of Information and Applied Technologies.
Daniel Booth, a senior from Elkville studying information systems technology, said the SIUC team put in weeks of training for the 20-hour event.
"There was a lot work outside of school, researching different technologies, just playing with it, trying to break it, trying to figure out what works," Booth said. "We actually had a mock competition that allowed us to see what our strengths and weaknesses were."
William Devenport, director of the School of Information Systems and Applied Technology, said he was pleased with the team's performance.
"It was a very close competition and I'm very proud of how our students performed, but DePaul came out on top," he said.
Mark Buchanan, manager of SAVVIS Corporation Information Security, was one of the people in charge of attacking the team's networks. He said the defenders kept him on his toes.
"It was a little overwhelming - three or four of us working to crack into 56 machines that were rapidly changing," he said. "We were trying to shoot at a moving target."
Buchanan said although cyber-attacks were made, the competition was created to teach the students how to keep an Internet business running.
"The object of the competition was not to see how many times we could take down the machine - it was to allow them to secure their machines," Buchanan said. "Wal-Mart wouldn't just go and unplug Walmart.com because they got compromised."
Buchanan said the teams did a good job protecting their networks, but the SAVVIS team entered a couple of the team's databases though a planted e-mail.
"We sent them an e-mail, gave them a link to click on, it came up and we owned them," he said.
As for normal Internet users, Buchanan said hackers could enter people's databases even more easily.
"To be honest, it's sometimes scary how easy it is. If there's enough time, energy and money, they're going to get in," he said. "The biggest thing is to reduce as much risk as you can, and that's how you secure a system."
gonzalez@siu.edu 536-3311 ext. 266
