Competitions – Hackathons – Center for Cybersecurity Innovation (cityu.edu)
Teams wanting to register have until 9 days before the competition date to register.
NCAE info – Competitions – C2Games – Center for Cybersecurity Innovation
Occurs in the spring semester
National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition
NATIONAL COLLEGIATE CYBER DEFENSE COMPETITION
NICE Framework Category Alignment: Operate and Maintain & Protect and Defend
Skill Areas: System and network administration
The National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition is the finalist event for the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition system. College students compete in regional competitions to become one of the 10 finalists to make it to the national event. Student teams assume administrative and protective duties for an existing “commercial” network. Each team begins with an identical set of software and hardware and is scored on their ability to detect and respond to outside threats, respond to business requests, maintain the availability of existing services and balance security needs against business needs.
NICE Framework Category Alignment: Operate and Maintain & Protect and Defend
Skill Areas: System and network administration
The National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition is the finalist event for the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition system. College students compete in regional competitions to become one of the 10 finalists to make it to the national event. Student teams assume administrative and protective duties for an existing “commercial” network. Each team begins with an identical set of software and hardware and is scored on their ability to detect and respond to outside threats, respond to business requests, maintain the availability of existing services and balance security needs against business needs.
CONRAD CHALLENGE
NICE Framework Category Alignment: Securely Provision & Oversee and Govern
Skill Areas: Skills vary by individual challenge
The Conrad Challenge is an annual, multi-phase innovation and entrepreneurship competition that encourages young adults to participate in designing the future. Each year, teams of 2-5 students, ages 13-18, from around the world create products and/or services to address some of the most pressing global and local challenges. They become entrepreneurial problem-solvers, addressing challenging social, scientific and societal issues through utilizing their creativity and critical- thinking skills. Participants work together to identify challenges and develop solutions to some of the world’s most complex problems in any of the following categories: Aerospace & Aviation, Cyber-Technology & Security, Energy & Environment, Health & Nutrition, Transforming Education Through Technology, Smoke-Free World: Eliminating & Reducing Teen Vaping, and Smoke-Free World: Re-purposed Farmlands & Tobacco Crops. Teams may submit in multiple categories if desired.
CYBER FORCE COMPETITION
NICE Framework Category Alignment: Operate and Maintain & Protect and Defend
Skill Areas: Skills vary by individual challenge
The Department of Energy CyberForce Competition is a cyber defense competition focusing on energy cyber infrastructure. Scenarios have an energy focus, on subjects like power distributors and water and power delivery systems. There are five teams in the CyberForce Competition: the Blue Team, which ensures proper IT support is administered; the Red Team, which attacks the Blue Team’s infrastructure; the White Team, which consists of IT administrators and architects of the competition; the Green Team, which tests the usability and availability of the Blue Team’s systems; and the Phish Tank, which allows Blue Team members to pitch a defense strategy. Teams are scored on creativity and innovation.
COLLEGIATE SOCIAL ENGINEERING CAPTURE-THE-FLAG (SECTF)
NICE Framework Category Alignment: Analyze, Investigate, & Oversee and Govern
Skill Areas: Analyzes Data and Information, Written and Communication Skills, reconnaissance, human-socio-psychological aspects
The Collegiate Social Engineering Capture-the-Flag (SECTF) is a competition and training event that allows students to compete in a purely social engineering intercollegiate competition and offers free training to students and educators. The Collegiate SECTF is grounded in the social sciences and offers a timely and unique platform for students to learn about social engineering in a hands-on, engaging, and ethical manner.
DEF CON CONTESTS Probably the largest cybersecurity conference, DEF CON presents a wide range of contents that often change from year to year. Common competitions include hacking, lockpicking, scavenger hunts, and the highly prestigious capture the flag contest. The conference takes place in Las Vegas annually. |
PANOPLY
NICE Framework Category Alignment: Securely Provision & Investigate
Skill Areas: System and network administration
Panoply, a Network Security Competition, is a network assessment and network defense competition combined into a single event. Teams of students compete for control of common resources and the critical services on those resources. Once a team takes possession of a resource, they must secure that resource against attacks from other teams and maintain the critical services running on the resource. Teams accumulate points for controlling and operating critical services such as SMTP, DNS, HTTP, HTTPS, SSH, etc.
NSA CODEBREAKER CHALLENGE
NICE Framework Category Alignment: Securely Provision & Investigate
Skill Areas: Encryption algorithms and stenography, digital forensics, cryptography, networking
NACLO is a contest in which high school students solve linguistic puzzles. In solving these puzzles, students learn about the diversity and consistency of language, while exercising logic skills. No prior knowledge of linguistics or second languages is necessary. Professionals in linguistics, computational linguistics and language technologies use dozens of languages to create engaging problems that represent cutting edge issues in their fields. The competition has attracted top students to study and work in those same fields. It is truly an opportunity for young people to experience a taste of natural-language processing in the 21st century.
The National Security Agency (NSA) Codebreaker Challenge provides students with a hands-on opportunity to develop their reverse-engineering and low-level code analysis skills while working on a realistic problem set centered around the NSA's mission.
PRESIDENT’S CUP CYBERSECURITY COMPETITION
NICE Framework Category Alignment: Protect and Defend, Investigate, Operate and Maintain, & Securely Provision
Skill Areas: Dependent upon track and the round. Resources provided on website.
The President’s Cup has two tracks and participants can choose to compete in one or both:
Individuals: enroll as an individual and compete in one or both of two tracks: offensive and defensive.
Teams: enroll in groups of two to five from across the government and take on tasks drawn from eight in-demand work roles.
It has three rounds between August and December. The first two will take place virtually and participants only need internet access and a web browser to compete. The finals will be held in person at the Cyberecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)’s Arlington, VA, facility as conditions allow.
· Round 1: Open to the entire federal workforce
· Round 2: The top 100 scores from each track and teams in round 1
· Finals: The top 10 individuals from each track and top 5 teams from round 2
SANS ACES
NICE Framework Category Alignment: Operate and Maintain
Skill Areas: Networking, operating systems, system administration
SANS Cyber Aces Online is online content that teaches the core concepts needed to assess and protect information security systems. Content was developed by SANS, and includes an engaging, self-paced, easy to use combination of tutorial and videos. It’s available as open courseware so you can take it anytime. For each of the modules, competitors will participate in a national competition by taking an on-line multiple- choice quiz.
SANS NETWARS
NICE Framework Category Alignment: Securely Provision & Operate and Maintain
Skill Areas: Skills range by individual competitions
The SANS Institute offers a series of challenge types through their NetWars modules. These challenges are available for a wide variety of skill levels, and even feature a miniaturized physical city over which challenge participants can attempt to compete for the cyber resources. A wide range of competitions are available throughout the year in locations around the world.
CYBER 9/12 STRATEGY CHALLENGE
NICE Framework Category Alignment: Operate and Maintain & Oversee and Govern
Skill Areas: Analyze, investigate, policy, legal, strategize
The Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge is an annual cyber policy and strategy competition where students from across the globe compete in developing policy recommendations tackling a fictional cyber catastrophe. This one-of-a-kind cyber competition is designed to provide students from across academic disciplines with a deeper understanding of the policy and strategy challenges associated with management of tradeoffs during a cyber crisis. Part interactive learning experience and part competitive scenario exercise, it challenges students to respond to a realistic, evolving scenario of international cyber crisis, analyze the threat it poses to national, international, and private-sector interests, and provide recommendations on the best course of action to mitigate the crisis.
U.S. CYBER CHALLENGE
NICE Framework Category Alignment: Securely Provision & Oversee and Govern
Skill Areas: Skills range by individual competitions
Cyber Quests are a series of fun but challenging on-line competitions allowing participants to demonstrate their knowledge in a variety of information security realms. Each quest features an artifact for analysis, along with a series of quiz questions. Some quests focus on a potentially vulnerable sample web server as the artifact, challenging participants to identify its flaws using vulnerability analysis skills. Other quests are focused around forensic analysis, packet capture analysis, and more. The quests have varying levels of difficulty and complexity, with some quests geared toward beginners, while others include more intermediate and ultimately advanced material.
U.S. CYBER GAMES
NICE Framework Category Alignment: Analyze, Operate and Maintain, Protect and Defend, Collect and Operate, Investigate, & Securely Provision
Skill Areas: Cryptography, Reverse Engineering, Forensics, Web Exploitation, Reconnaissance, Networking
The US Cyber Games identify the very best in cybersecurity through the three phases:
· US Cyber Open: Applicants ages 18 to 26 from across the nation will compete in a two-week Open Capture the Flag (CTF) competition consisting of a series of virtual cybersecurity challenges, where they will be scored in multiple cybersecurity areas.
· US Cyber Combine Invitational: 60 athlete players will be invited to participate in a number of virtual learning games and programs over eight weeks. During this qualifying phase, athletes will undergo an aptitude for cyber evaluation, interview with multiple coaches, and perform in an advanced CTF qualifier round.
US Cyber Team of drafted cybersecurity athletes: 20 top cybersecurity athletes will be selected for the US Cyber Team to represent the United States at the annual International Cybersecurity Challenge (ICC).
NICE Framework Category Alignment: Operate and Maintain & Protect and Defend
Skill Areas: Skills vary by individual challenge topic. System and network administration, programming, reverse engineering
eCYBERMISSION is a web-based science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) competition for students in grades six through nine. Students are challenged to explore how STEM works in their world while working as a team to solve problems in their community. Teams compete virtually in state and regional competitions and in- person through the National Judging & Educational Event (NJ&EE). Student prizes are awarded at the state, regional, and national levels by grade level. Three mission areas National Security & Safety, Robotics, and Technology connect directly with cybersecurity.
JUNIOR SCIENCE AND HUMANITIES SYMPOSIA (JSHS)
NICE Framework Category Alignment: Securely Provision & Oversee and Govern
Skill Areas: Skills vary by individual challenge
The Junior Science and Humanities Symposia (JSHS) Program is a tri-service – U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force – sponsored STEM competition which promotes original research and experimentation in the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) at the high school level and publicly recognizes students for outstanding achievement. By connecting talented students, their teachers, and research professionals at affiliated symposia and by rewarding research excellence, JSHS aims to widen the pool of trained talent prepared to conduct research and development vital to our nation. Several categories connect with cybersecurity.
U.S.A MATHEMATICAL TALENT SEARCH (USAMTS)
NICE Framework Category Alignment: Securely Provision & Investigate
Skill Areas: Encryption algorithms, digital forensics, cryptography, networking
A monthly online mathematics competition where students are given one math problem to solve. Because of the level of difficulty, students (middle and high school) have the remainder of the month to work out solutions. Students' solutions are graded by mathematicians, and comments are returned to the students to develop their problem-solving skills and writing abilities. Participants are eligible for various prizes, such as books and software throughout the year. Additionally, the top scorers are invited to take the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME), a process necessary for applying to the USA Mathematical Olympiad Team. The USAMTS is primarily sponsored by the National Security Agency.
Numerai: Numerai is a unique data science competition platform where participants are given obfuscated datasets and asked to create machine learning models to predict financial markets. Unlike other competitions, the data provided by Numerai doesn’t include any traditional financial information but is encrypted to preserve the privacy of the underlying trades. Competitors are rewarded with cryptocurrency (Numeraire, NMR) for their successful predictions. One of the defining characteristics of Numerai is its goal to build a decentralized hedge fund using the power of global data scientists.
MachineHack: MachineHack is a platform that hosts online data science competitions, which helps data scientists showcase their skills and compete with other professionals worldwide. The platform offers a wide range of real-world problems from various domains like retail, healthcare, finance, and many more. Participants apply their machine learning and AI skills to solve these problems and climb up the leaderboard. MachineHack is also a community platform where participants can learn from each other, share knowledge, and grow their network.
Zindi: Zindi is Africa’s largest data science competition platform with the mission to solve the continent’s most pressing problems through machine learning and AI. Zindi connects a community of data scientists with NGOs, governments, and private businesses that provide datasets and problem statements. It hosts competitions related to various sectors like agriculture, healthcare, finance, and wildlife conservation, among others. Zindi also provides a platform for learning and career advancement, contributing to building the future of data science in Africa.
Kaggle: Kaggle is one of the most popular and diverse data science competition platforms in the world. Hosted by Google, Kaggle is a community of data scientists and machine learners who participate in competitions to solve complex problems presented by companies and institutions. These competitions span numerous fields such as computer vision, natural language processing, and classical prediction problems. Besides competitions, Kaggle also provides public datasets for practice, a cloud-based workbench, and a learning environment for data science tutorials.
DrivenData: DrivenData brings cutting-edge practices in data science and crowdsourcing to some of the world’s biggest social challenges and the organizations taking them on. They host online challenges, usually with a data science for social good angle, where a global community of data scientists competes to come up with the best statistical model for difficult predictive problems that make a difference.
Data Science Global Impact Challenge: The Data Science Global Impact Challenge is an annual competition hosted by DataRobot. This competition is a call to all data scientists to develop machine learning models that can help address various global issues. The competition has a strong focus on social good and encourages the application of machine learning to solve problems in areas such as climate change, biodiversity, health, and more.
REGENERON SCIENCE TALENT SEARCH (STS)
NICE Framework Category Alignment: Dependent upon research area
Skill Areas: Dependent upon research area
The nation’s oldest and most prestigious science competition. Entrants to this competition must conduct an original research project and supplement their applications with recommendation letters and transcripts.13 alumni have won the Nobel Prize. Forty finalists are selected and receive an all-expenses-paid trip to Washington, D.C. for in-depth judging.
What the Hack is a hackathon event that brings together developers, designers, and entrepreneurs from around the world to collaborate and create innovative solutions to real-world problems. The event typically lasts 24 to 48 hours, and participants form teams to develop prototypes and pitch their ideas to a panel of judges for a chance to win prizes and gain recognition in the tech community.
Major League Hacking (MLH) is a global organization that supports and empowers the hacker community through organizing hackathons, workshops, and other events. MLH aims to create a supportive and inclusive environment for developers and innovators to collaborate, learn new skills, and build innovative projects.
HackMIT is an annual hackathon event held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where students from around the globe gather to collaborate on innovative projects. Over a 24-hour period, participants form teams, develop ideas, and create prototypes that address various challenges. The event is highly competitive and includes workshops, mentorship, and networking opportunities for aspiring developers and entrepreneurs.
Hack Club is a nonprofit organization that aims to foster a global network of high school coding clubs. Their mission is to empower students by providing them with the necessary resources, tools, and guidance to start and run successful coding clubs. Hack Club offers a structured curriculum, workshops, mentorship, and various events to encourage collaboration, learning, and community building among young developers.
Hackathon in the Cloud is a virtual hackathon event that leverages cloud computing technologies and services to bring together developers, designers, and entrepreneurs from around the world. The event typically focuses on solving real-world problems using cloud-based tools and platforms, encouraging participants to innovate, collaborate, and create practical solutions. These virtual events provide an opportunity for participants to connect, learn, and showcase their skills without geographical constraints.
NICE Framework Category Alignment: Securely Provision & Oversee and Govern Skill Areas: Skills vary by individual challenge Participants engage in real-world problem solving, rooted in STEM. The challenge is to look 20 years into the future and communicate a new future technology.