San Diego Mayor's Cup (Cyber Challenge)

What: San Diego Mayor's Cup (Cyber Challenge).  The San Diego Mayor's (Jerry Sanders) Office, SAIC, NDIA, ESET, and UCSD are hosting the San Diego Mayor's Cup (Cyber Challenge) at UCSD on Saturday, 26 February 2011.  This event is a part of their STEM outreach programs and seeks to encourage high school students to consider majors and careers in STEM disciplines. 

The San Diego Mayor’s Cup invites all California high schools to participate in a three-phase cyber defense competition. The first two rounds (practice and qualification) will use the distributed game mode, where they can train and then compete simultaneously via the Internet. The eight winners of the qualification round will then participate in a head-to-head comprehensive finals round, where each team will have its own CyberNEXS environment.  [CyberNEXS provides a live exercise environment consisting of Windows and UNIX operating systems, network and security devices, as well as other information resources.]  During the final competition, teams will be scored on their ability to administer the following four essential skills:

1)    maintenance of critical services;

2)    removing vulnerabilities and hardening systems;

3)    communicating status and resource requirements; and

4)    thwarting and removing hacker activities.

Following the finals round, the participating teams will be hosted to an awards banquet at UCSD.

When:  Practices round will be conducted anytime during 72-hour windows from 9-11 November and 11-13 January.  [The purpose of the practice rounds is to familiarize students with the competition environment and verify that their computers are able to access the competition software and images.]  Qualification round will be held on 5 February.  [The purpose of the qualification round is to select the top 8 teams to compete in the finals round.]  Finals round will be held on 26 February.

Where:  The practice and qualification rounds will be conducted via the Internet.  The finals round will be held at UCSD. 

Contact:  Interested teachers should contact Bruce Arnold, UCSD, barnold@ucsd.edu.  Teams should consist of 6-8 interested high school or middle school students and their coach. 

 CLICK HERE for flyer.