The purpose of the contest held Friday was to maintain the team’s network service while attempting to break into their opponents’ systems.
The organizer of the event, professor Giovanni Vigna, set up the contest as part of his graduate class on Network Security and Intrusion Detection. He says that the hands-on exercise is one of the most effective tools in teaching network security. The idea isn’t to create skilled hackers, but highly trained guardians of computer networks able to combat nefarious attacks on a system’s security.
UCSB has established a strong reputation for teaching computer network security, said Engineering Dean Matt Terill. The school’s group went up against students from West Point, the Naval Post Graduate School at Monterey, University of Texas at Austin and Georgia Tech among others. The UCSB team Whitehat (a term for “good-guy” hackers) maintained a lead throughout the day.