ANNAPOLIS, Md. (NNS) -- The U.S. Naval Academy won the 15th annual Cyber Defense Exercise (CDX) hosted by the National Security Agency April 13-16.
CDX is a cybersecurity exercise in which students from service academies design and build computer networks and defend them against intrusions by the National Security Agency/Central Security Services (NSA/CSS) Red Team (Red Cell).
The exercise was headquartered this year at the Parsons facility in Columbia, Md., with each academy's team competing on a virtual private network from their home locations. In addition to the U.S. Naval Academy, competing this year were teams from the U.S. Military Academy, U.S. Air Force Academy, U.S. Coast Guard Academy, U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, Air Force Institute of Technology and Royal Military College of Canada.
Teams chose how to use the resources at their disposal to best defend their networks and to keep certain critical services running, while the attackers attempted to infiltrate the networks and disrupt those services.
"The CDX is an important complement to the fundamentals the midshipmen learn in the classroom," said Cmdr. Mike Bilzor, professor in the Computer Science Department and one of many faculty members who coached the team. "The skills they have to employ - intrusion detection, log analysis, reverse engineering, and digital forensics, to name a few - require them to learn a great deal more about computer and network security. These are skills that many of them will use in the fleet."
A separate team of NSA specialists graded each team's ability to effectively maintain network services while detecting, responding to, and recovering from security intrusions or compromises.
NSA designed the competition to give students experience with designing and implementing computer security solutions with limited resources, as well as to encourage some friendly competition among the services. Students learned how to work as a team to ensure that their plan effectively protected their networks from attacks and how to react when the defenses did not work as expected.
"The competitive aspect inspires the midshipmen to work that much harder," said Bilzor. "We're thankful to NSA for hosting another great event, and we salute the other academies on an outstanding competition."
The Naval Academy last won the CDX in 2010.
"The team has been able to train exceptionally hard this year, thanks to the Cyber Center providing a dedicated training space, and the midshipmen being allowed time to train together during selected afternoons," said Bilzor. "You fight like you train, and cyber defense is at least as training intensive as any sport."
For more news from U.S. Naval Academy, visit www.navy.mil/local/usna/.