After receiving first place at the National Cyber League in April 2019, the Nevada Cyber Club hopes hear good results after completing the National Cyber League Team Competition.
The National Cyber League is a bi-annual puzzle-based competition for high school and college students, according to their official website. The competition provides both offensive and defensive virtual training for high school and college students to prepare them to face cybersecurity problems that are common in the workforce.
The NCL competition is based on CompTIA Security+ and EC-Council Certified Ethical Hacker performance objectives set to test: open-source intelligence, scanning, enumeration, exploitation, password cracking, traffic analysis, log analysis, wireless security, cryptography and web application security, according to the NCL official website.
The Nevada Cyber Club has been competing in the NCL competition since 2016.
Last semester, the team received first place out of 250 teams across the country. Two members of the team, Bryson Lingenfelter and Edgar Fyodorov, placed in the top 10 individually against more than 5,000 participants.
“The NCL is the best competition to introduce students to real-life challenges in the workforce,” said club President Bryson Lingenfelter. “Ninety percent of the competition is working through challenges you’ve never seen before and learning to be uncomfortable.”
The competition is broken into three parts: preseason, individual game and team game. During the preseason, students compete to figure out which level of difficulty they will be competing in. During the individual game, participants compete against their bracket to be ranked overall and during the team game, teams with two to seven members compete to beat other teams across the country.
The Nevada Cyber Club has already completed preseason and the individual game. They completed the team game from Friday, Nov. 15 to Sunday, Nov. 17. This semester, they have more than double the members. They hope to continue their successful streak with two teams.
On team one, Edgar Fyodorov, Ignacio Astaburuaga, Ian Grant, Clifford Richardson, Jordan Andrieu and Andrew McIntyre collaborated together to complete the tasks for the Team Game.
On team two, Andrew Flangas, Bryson Lingenfelter, Sara Davis, Chance Harrison, John Clough, Trish Ryan and Brooke Lanier worked together to complete the competition.
Bryson Lingenfelter feels confident that they will be successful in the team competitions.
“Both teams have at least two people who were on the winning team last year so we have plenty of experience,” said Lingenfelter. “I think both teams will get top ten. I’m hoping we can get [the] two teams in the top five.”
After the competition this weekend, participants will be able to see their results when the fall season ends on Dec. 14.
For the students in the Nevada Cyber Club, the competition gives them the chance to grow the skills they have learned throughout the semester. When the club is not preparing for competition, they are planning workshops for the community and inviting guest speakers to speak about cybersecurity.
