San Diego Mayor's Cyber Cup

Overview

The 2010 San Diego Mayor's Cyber Cup invited all San Diego high schools to participate in a three-phase cyber defense competition series. The competition was open to all 140 high schools in the San Diego region.

National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) again sponsored this project as one of its science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) outreach initiatives. University of California, San Diego (UCSD) coordinated school participation and hosted the competition at the Center for Library and Instructional Computing Services (CLICS) facility and the awards banquet following the competition. ESET contributed scholarship funds.

The final six-hour competition was followed by a reception with Mayor Sanders, an awards ceremony and a dinner hosted by NDIA and catered by UCSD.

Preliminary Rounds

The first two rounds used the distributed game mode, so schools could train and then compete simultaneously via the Internet. The eight winners of the qualification round then participated in a head-to-head, comprehensive, centralized game, wherein all teams had individual SAIC Cyber Network EXercise System (CyberNEXS) environments. This environment provided for eight to 10 blue (contestant) targets, red (hacker) and white (referee) team resources and the scoring system (ScoreBot).

Finals

During the finals, students were expected to remove vulnerabilities and maintain critical services in their Windows® servers while thwarting live hacker attacks. SAIC provided the competition engine, CyberNEXS, which was run remotely from the company's Campus Point facility. SAIC also provided the red (attackers) and white (support desk) personnel.

2010 Results

The competition's finals took place at the UCSD campus on Saturday, March 27. La Jolla High School won the competition. The other three finalists were Canyon Crest Academy, Pacific Technology School, and Westview High School.

Pacific Technology School, comprised of middle school students, placed third in the contest and came from Orange County for the competition.

Background and History

In the fall of 2007, the NDIA San Diego Chapter selected cyber security competitions as one of their key STEM initiatives for 2007-2008. The UCDS Physical Sciences Department and SAIC teamed to deliver the NDIA Cyber Defense Competition. In the spring of 2008, five San Diego-based high schools participated in this proof-of-concept competition.

Each school met at the SAIC Campus Point facility, where SAIC provided baseline instruction on Microsoft Corporation's Windows Security in the morning, followed by pizza for lunch and then the competition in the afternoon.

The final event was attended by the mayor of San Diego, Jerry Sanders. After the five individual training and exercising events, UCSD hosted a banquet to announce the winners and present the awards. Everyone expressed great interest in when the next competition of this kind could be conducted.

Since then, SAIC has developed a second-generation competition system called the CyberNEXS, which now provides a highly scalable training, exercising, competition and certification system. This technology and procedures have been tested and validated during the recent Air Force Association Cyber Patriot II National High School Cyber Defense competition series, which included several qualification rounds that were run via the Internet.

SAIC approached the mayor's office to see if the city would like to participate in this very exciting and important STEM program and institutionalize it as the Mayor's Cyber Cup. The mayor's office accepted to help highlight this very important skill set requirement for the U.S. workforce.