Franklin, MA (March 6th) UNH competing for the first time in the NCCDC finished 4th in the 11 team northeast regional featuring teams from Harvard, Maine and the current national champions Northeastern.  This year's regional winner RIT advances to the national finals in April hosted by University of Texas.

The 3 day competition required each team to run all aspects of a modern IT department.  Tasks included managing information technology, web service deployment, business operations as well as defending against a wide range of physical, logical, criminal and virtual attacks.  The organizers brought in a highly trained and well respected team of experts from companies like RSA, Core Security, and Rapid7(Metasploit).  The result was all the teams were hacked and had to operate in adverse conditions.

The UNH team included graduate students Tim April (Hollis, NH) as the technical lead and Frank Kreimendahl (Newton, MA) providing intrusion monitoring.  The undergraduates included: Jared Hooper (Plaistow, NH) DNS, Chris Hutchins (Manchester. NH) user management,  Rishab Khanna (Milford, NH) web services, Alex MacPherson (Derry, NH) penetration testing and Aaron Teune (Concord, NH) networking and routing.

As team captain Aaron Lastoff (Pelham,NH) handled the demanding role of representing the team to competition officials, getting singled out for special assignments as well as completing management tasks assigned by the competition team.

Leading up the competition the team trained in a special lab in Kingsbury provided by the Computer Science department.  Ken Graf the team coach noted this is a very mentally challenging event and an emotional roller-coaster with what is normally a month's worth of work crammed into a single weekend.  I am proud how well the team supported each other and how well they represented themselves and UNH.  They are a credit to the University.

The NCCDC is a national effort to encourage students to enter computer security profession and foster curriculum development at the university level.  This year the northeastern regional was organized by Northeastern and hosted by EMC.  The competition included a networking event with leading employers.  Additional information can be found at http://neccdc.org or the http://nationalccdc.org