Skip to content
Reading time: 2 minutes
The Honolulu Community College and University of Hawaii-West Oahu student cyber security team placed second in the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition

A team from of Honolulu Community College’s IT Computing, Electronics and Networking Technologies (CENT) students and University of Hawaiʻi–West Oʻahu BAS CENT students placed second in the At-Large Regional of the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition. The team was under the mentorship of Honolulu Professor Aaron Tanaka.

The Honolulu CC and UH West Oʻahu team consisted of Team Captain Thomas Dwyer, Michael Caralos, Taylor Kina, Christopher Pachoiczak, Joseph Santiago, Jianjum Tan, Anthony Vandegrift and Zhi Hai Wu.

The Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition is a three-day cyber security competition which specifically focuses on the operational aspects of managing and protecting an existing “commercial” network infrastructure. College teams consist of up to eight full-time students who operate as a blue team (defenders). The white team (industry judges) is responsible for giving students injects or tasks to be accomplished as well as grading their performance. The students are required to perform these tasks while a red team (attackers) attempt to disrupt their actions.

For this competition, the students were put in charge of managing and securing a fictitious bio-tech animal research facility. The students had to deal with a bomb threat, attacks from animal rights hacktivists, all the while attempting to perform tasks given to them from a fictitious boss. In the scenario, the bomb did go off and the students were tasked with getting the system online again from a “warm” backup site.

Adapted from a Honolulu CC news release

Back To Top