RUSEC TAKES ON MACCDC 2024!

Our journey to MACCDC this year did not begin in the early hours of the 22nd of March. It began months earlier, even before our qualifying round in January. Many hours, long nights of preparation, and practice added to the weight on our shoulders encapsulated by the desire to improve our performance and engage in friendly rivalries with other competitors.

CCDC itself is a cybersecurity competition format best described by its intensity and chaos. The competitors take the form of an IT & Security operations team of an imaginary organization. Some competitions bring more character to their organizations than others. In this year’s MACCDC, we had to defend an organization bearing a German name that none of us could pronounce. The organization was under the regulatory oversight of multiple controls and frameworks ranging from U.S based to international. These policies governed the IT operations and strategy of our temporary employers. Throughout the entirety of a standard work day, 9 AM - 5:00 PM, we are tasked to defend this organization. All the while, we were simultaneously dealing with the aggressive efforts of a volunteer Red Team, who were mostly sober, to gain access to our machines and take down certain services that are scored based on uptime. Aside from taking down services the Red Team took no issue in disrupting our operations and even kicking us out of our machines. Primarily the service uptime lead our score as well as Injects - Business continuity documents that come periodically throughout the competition with various tasks. Injects can range from policy creation & analysis, setting up and moving services, providing evidence and information on currently running tools, services, and devices, and investigative forensic puzzles. Another key piece of the score came in the form of being able to gain back points from compromises by writing detailed and well structured incident response reports. In addition, we periodically sent out a representative for executive meetings regarding our operations.

The competition began first thing Saturday at 9:00 AM after our sleepy and hungry competition team made their way to Prince George’s Community College. Luckily this year our hotel arrangements were not nearly as questionable, unsanitary, and infectious as last year's! We were kept extremely busy and alert until 5:00 PM. Referred to as the “worst possible day in IT,” the pressure and heat of this competition did not let up, even from the beginning. Almost immediately upon starting we began scrambling for access to our GitHub repository, changing passwords, and worrying about injections due within the first 30 minutes of the competition. This pace was kept relatively steady throughout the majority of the competition until the last two hours when the injects increased in difficulty and the red team had fully begun to take out services without restraint. The Red Team also started to revoke our ability to access some machines, going as far as greeting our attempts to log back into a machine with an infinitely looping video of Nyan Cat. Suffice it to say, we found it best to mute the computer. Throughout our competition, anyone who wanted food or water had to leave the competition area and run to the other side of the performing arts center for any form of sustenance. Because of the nature of the competition, we had to eat as much pizza and drink as much water as possible before running back into the black box, praying we did not miss a score-altering event.

In the end, we placed 4th out of 10 teams. The standings were as follows; First - University of Virginia, Second - Pennsylvania State University, Third - Liberty University, Fourth - Rutgers University, Fifth - George Mason University, Sixth - University of Maryland - Baltimore City, Seventh - University of Maryland - Global Campus, Eight - Messiah University, Ninth - Rowan College of South Jersey, Tenth - Virginia Tech. Despite placing fourth for the second consecutive year, we had beaten out a larger number of teams and had a substantially higher service score. We now look back with a sense of pride in the effort, camaraderie, and passion we put on display. Some may see a competition this intense as masochistic, and they wouldn’t be entirely wrong. However, there is a sense of accomplishment and pride that comes with performing under that kind of pressure while sharing that challenge with like minded teammates. We’re underdogs, and that mentality will always push us to be better. We are deeply grateful to the trailblazers who pioneered Rutgers' participation in the CCDC. We aim to instill the same competitive spirit, work ethic, and unity in future team members to ensure the tradition continues.

The Team on Review

We asked our team, two questions - What was the most challenging part of this year's MACCDC? and What was the most exciting part of this year's MACCDC?