News Article Release

Midshipmen Compete in NSA Cyber Defense Exercise

April 19, 2012

By MC2 Alexia Riveracorrea

A team of Naval Academy midshipmen participated in the 2012 National Security Agency’s Cyber Defense Exercise conducted April 17-19 in Annapolis, Md.

The exercise is a competition designed by the National Security Agency and includes teams from the U.S. Naval Academy, U.S. Military Academy, U.S. Air Force Academy, U.S. Coast Guard Academy, U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, Air Force Institute of Technology and the Royal Military College of Canada.

The Naval Academy team won the exercise in 2005 and 2010.

During the event, representatives from each of these schools defend their virtual computer network against malicious attacks by a team of NSA “hackers.” Teams must choose how to use the resources at their disposal to best defend their virtual network and to keep certain critical services running, while the attackers attempt to infiltrate the network and disrupt these services.

“It’s all about how we can best protect our systems given certain criteria that we must meet,” said Midshipman 1st Class Kevin Lees.

The competition is designed to give students experience with designing and implementing computer security solutions with limited resources, as well as encourage some friendly competition among the services.

“This exercise is an opportunity for midshipmen to actually build and defend a real network,” said team leader Midshipman 1st Class William Henry. “Regardless of what we service select, once we get to the fleet, everyone will be responsible for cyber security. We have to understand the basic things we can do to secure communication channels and any information systems we rely on heavily.”

Students learn how to work with a team to ensure their plan will effectively protect their network from attacks and learn how to react when the defenses do not work as expected.

“This is a real, hands-on applicable time where we can use the skills that we have learned in cyber defense classes. At the end, we all trade notes to figure out what worked and what didn’t,” said Lee. “It’s a great learning experience.”

The mids spent the year prior to the competition building their network. One month before the exercise, they receive several misconfigured workstations filled with malware which they have to reconfigure properly and integrate into their own network, said Henry.

“During the actual competition, we are given few extra elements to integrate into the network at the last second,” he said.