From left are UVA coach Daniel Graham; UVA team members August Bresnaider, Maxim Gorodchanin, Chase Hildebrand, Christopher Marotta, Kyle McDonald and Ethan Steere; Col. David Gray, director of the VMI Center for Leadership and Ethics; David Raymond, head of Virginia Cyber Range; and Sarah Solari Hayes, portfolio director, Commonwealth Cyber Initiative.
The team from the University of Virginia Department of Computer Science brought the Virginia Cyber Cup home to Charlottesville after an impressive runaway performance in the cyber security competition.
Teams vied for the cup at Commonwealth Cyber Fusion, an annual conference of the 24 Virginia colleges and universities that are designated National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense.
UVA team members August Bresnaider, Maxim Gorodchanin, Chase Hildebrand, Christopher Marotta, Kyle McDonald and Ethan Steere competed under the coaching of their advisor, Daniel Graham, an assistant professor of computer science.“I am so proud of how well our students did in the competition,” Graham said. “They were also very gracious and offered to support and advise when approached afterward by teams from other universities.”
The Virginia Cyber Cup is a capture-the-flag cybersecurity challenge event in which the “flag” is a piece of data the teams must find using real-world cybersecurity concepts. The challenges are designed to test, teach and hone team members' computer security skills across a range of categories, such as cryptography, network traffic analysis and reverse engineering.
Commonwealth Cyber Fusion, held this year at Virginia Military Institute, was co-hosted by the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative and Virginia Cyber Range, which provided the competition platform.
Scroll down for more photos from the event.