A team of Cal Poly Pomona students took home the top trophy at the Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition (CPTC) global finals Jan. 6-9. Stanford placed second and Tennessee Technological University placed third.
This was Cal Poly Pomona’s first time winning the competition, which challenges the world’s brightest cybersecurity college students to put their hacking skills to the test.
At the CPTC finals, teams from 15 universities faced off to see who was best at breaking into fabricated computer networks, evaluating their weak points, and presenting plans to better secure them. This year’s competition was held in a hybrid format at Rochester Institute of Technology, in Rochester, N.Y.
The CPTC has become the premier offense-based collegiate computing security event, since starting at RIT seven years ago. CPTC is an effective counterpart to the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC), which is the premier defense-based event for college students.
“The cream of the crop are coming to this competition, and it’s really motivating for us and our future,” said Bob Kalka ’89 (computer science), vice president of IBM’s Security Business Unit, which sponsors CPTC. “We literally get to watch the top cybersecurity students from around the globe at work, doing what they do best.”
The pentesting competition allows students to experience a day in the life of a penetration tester—the in-demand security professionals hired to test and evaluate an organization’s computer systems and networks to make sure malicious hackers can’t get in.
Teams of six students interrogated a mock company’s network. The next day, they presented a report on their findings and offered th ..
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