The U.S. Military Academy (West Point) won the 2016 Cyber Defense Exercise (CDX), marking its eighth win since the competition began in 2001, the NSA said Friday.
Hosted by Parsons at its Columbia, Md., facility from April 11-14 (Defense Daily, April 14), the exercise tested the cybersecurity skills and ingenuity of cadets and midshipmen from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, the U.S. Military Academy, the U.S. Naval Academy, and the Royal Military College of Canada.
CDX was sponsored by the national Security Agency’s Information Assurance Directorate (IAD) and West Point won the Information Assurance Director’s Trophy as a winning prize.
The exercise includes over 150 participants and consists of network specialists tasked with securing the most sensitive government communication systems challenging trams from military institutions in their ability to defend computer networks the participants designed, built, and configured at their respective institutions. A separate group of specialists then grade each team’s ability to effectively maintain network services while detecting, responding to, and recovering from cyber network attacks.
“CDX is a uniquely important exercise to develop the cyber security skills of the students at these military institutions. It is an exercise where the participants put theory and classroom instruction into practice,” Kim Beam, an IAD senior leader, said in a statement.
“CDX provides a competition that increases the participants’ cyber defense skills. Defensive skills and insights are gained not only by the network defenders, but also by those playing offense during the exercise. They’ll go back to defending networks post CDX,” Beam added.
Beyond the core exercises, the students’ analytic skills were tested in three challenge modules, the NSA said.
The modules and their winners are malware analysis/reverse engineering challenge with the U.S. Naval Academy, host and network forensics challenge with the U.S. Military Academy, and offensive ethical hacking challenge with a tie between the Royal Military College of Canada graduate team and undergraduate team.
West Point’s eight wins makes it the most frequent winner of CDX, followed by the U.S. Air Force Academy with four wins.