Kickstarting Your Career in Cybersecurity — Cyber Competitions
Author’s note: I originally published this article on LinkedIn. Since then, I have curated some competition-oriented resources on my Github site.
Participating in cybersecurity competitions is an excellent way to learn new skills and to be introduced to different areas of focus in the field. There are several types of competitions and they can be team or individual based. Quite a few are for students only, but others are open to anyone. The first time I ever competed was in the Mid-Atlantic Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (MACCDC) regional qualifiers. MACCDC is a team-based competition for college students and involves defending a virtual network while keeping critical services running. I was put on the “Linux” team (at the time I had no Linux experience whatsoever) and learned to harden a box via command line. It was essentially a crash course in user management, service configuration, firewall rules, etc. We didn’t make it to the regionals that year, but we did the following year. And yes, I was terrified that I was going to completely bomb and/or look stupid but neither happened. What did happen was that I learned some new skills and developed relationships with the other team members.
My next competition was the now defunct DoD Cyber Crime Center (DC3) Digital Forensics Challenge. That competition…
