They had been hacked.

Acting quickly, Brady said they rushed to unplug from the network and change their password to keep the intruders out.

This was part of a cyber defense competition, where competitors build a cyber fortress to defend against hackers.

David Bover, associate dean of the College of Sciences and Technology, is the faculty adviser for the Cyber Defense Team. He said because the world is so reliant on the Internet, everyone is highly vulnerable to attack from cyber invaders. 

As Bover sat at a table in his office, he pointed to an iMac on his desk.

“It could be that somebody from Russia is trying to attack my computer right now,” Bover said. “I just don’t know.”

Bover heard about a cyber defense competition for college students last year, and he took it upon himself to assemble a team.

Eight Western students took the challenge and competed in the Fourth Annual Pacific Rim Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition. After two months of practicing, they came in second place to the undefeated University of Washington team.

Three are at the competition: Besides the student teams, there is one white team that acts as the “businessmen” and one red team that acts as the “attackers.” The red team is comprised of defense professionals from Boeing, the U.S. Navy and Marines.

They spend two days in a frantic battle defending their servers from the evil red team.

Student teams keep a fake company’s server running, while completing assigned business tasks — called “injects.”

The business tasks include setting up emails and websites while giving presentations to their fictitious bosses.

The opposing red team is located in a separate room from the student teams. Only a glass partition separates the red team’s room from the students’ room.

The red team’s job is to act as merciless hackers playing tricks on the student teams, trying to break into each of their individual servers. Once they shut down the student teams by changing passwords and keeping students out of their own servers, the red team wins.

Judges award points to each student team based on how well they keep their severs running, fulfill business tasks and defend themselves against the red team. The team with the most points in the three areas is the winner.

Barbara Endicott-Popovsky, director for the Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity at the University of Washington, started the regional competition in 2008. But the competitions extend back to before 2005, when military academies used them for training.

In 2010 there were more than 300,000 complaints of cyber crimes in the U.S., the second highest ever, according to an Internet Crime Complaint Center report. Identity theft, not receiving payments for online purchases and impersonation of FBI agents were the most filed complaints.

Bover said the U.S. government needs more than 10,000 experts in cyber defense. Due to the recent recognition and implementation of cyber defense programs in colleges, Bover said it would take at least another 10 years before there are that many experts in cyber defense.

Brady has been interested in cyber security since he was 15 years old, but never competed in a competition until last year.

He said last year’s experience was a trial run to give Western’s team a feel for the competition. Brady said this year the team has a better understanding of what to expect and intends to be the first to bring the first place title to Western.

Brady said dealing with the red team’s dirty tricks was not an issue for his team last year. Western’s team defended their servers better than any other team at the competition.

Brady said they were fully capable of fulfilling the tasks, but were not able to meet their deadlines.

Last year, after struggling to setup and control their email server, Western’s team was mysteriously unable to use their email for an hour, Bover said.

This ended up costing as much as one-fifth of their points, which Brady said might have contributed to not winning first place.

To prevent last year’s difficulties at the competition, Western’s team has been working on assigning individual responsibilities for each team member. Bover said the team will have experts in everything they will be dealing with: email servers and the Windows and Linux operating systems.
Bover said the team started preparing for the competition this fall by getting team members together and practicing twice a week. The two-hour practices take place in the computer labs of the Communications Facility. Brady said it’s typical for team members to not attend both practices.

Practices consist of team members building up servers. Through tests, they try to detect weaknesses in the server and figure out how to avoid them.

“It’s a lot of learning of different types of software and configurations,” Brady said.

The Fifth Annual Pacific Rim Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition will be March 24 to 25 at Highline Community College in Des Moines, Wash.

Brady said he feels much more prepared and has every intention of getting first place and taking the team to San Antonio, Texas in April for the national competition.