Embry-Riddle Team Wins NIKSUN Cybersecurity Competition
Daytona Beach, FL (PRWEB) July 03, 2013 -- A team of two recent graduates from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s Daytona Beach Campus, called Team ByteCasters, recently won the first-ever NIKSUN Cybersecurity Tournament.
NIKSUN, a cybersecurity and network monitoring company based in Princeton, N.J., tasked two-person teams with using the IT skills they learned in college to solve four real-world cybersecurity challenges as quickly as possible by analyzing recorded Internet traffic.
Some of the challenges relied on several techniques—including sifting through large amounts of data, overcoming file encryption and discovering unknown protocols—to handle simulated scenarios in industrial espionage.
In the first round of the competition, conducted over the Internet and concluded on June 17, the Embry-Riddle ByteCasters tied for the lead.
In the final round, held June 25 at Bally's Hotel in Atlantic City, N.J., Team ByteCasters defeated contestants from DeVry Institute of Technology, New York Institute of Technology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and University of Southern California.
The Embry-Riddle team members accepted their first-place trophy and a $2,000 cash prize June 26 at a gala banquet held during the NIKSUN World Wide Security & Mobility Conference and the IEEE Global Wireless Summit at Bally’s Hotel.
Who: The ByteCasters team members were Embry-Riddle Spring 2013 graduates Michael Kouremetis (B.S. in Computer Science) and Maxwell DeWees (B.S. in Computer Engineering). Both alumni will enter cybersecurity-related master’s degree programs at Purdue University this fall—Kouremetis in Network Security and DeWees in Information Security. The team’s mentors were Embry-Riddle professors Dr. Keith Garfield and Dr. Remzi Seker. Team ByteCasters was sponsored by the Department of Electrical, Computer, Software and Systems Engineering at Embry-Riddle’s Daytona Beach Campus. Embry-Riddle’s other residential campus, in Prescott, Ariz., offers a B.S. in Cyber Intelligence & Security and a B.S. in Software Engineering with Cybersecurity Emphasis.
This news release is online at http://daytonabeach.erau.edu/news/niksun-cybersecurity-tournament.html.
Contact: Mary Van Buren, Assistant Director of University Internal Communications, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach, FL; (386) 226-6525; mary(dot)van(dot)buren(at)erau(dot)edu.
About Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, the world’s largest, fully accredited university specializing in aviation and aerospace, is a nonprofit, independent institution offering more than 40 baccalaureate, master’s and Ph.D. degree programs in its colleges of Arts and Sciences, Aviation, Business and Engineering. Embry-Riddle educates students at residential campuses in Daytona Beach, Fla., and Prescott, Ariz., and through the Worldwide Campus with more than 150 locations in the United States, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. The university is a major research center, seeking solutions to real-world problems in partnership with the aerospace industry, other universities and government agencies. For more information, visit http://www.embryriddle.edu, follow us on Twitter (@EmbryRiddle) and http://www.facebook.com/EmbryRiddleUniversity, and find expert videos at YouTube.com/EmbryRiddleUniv.
Mary Van Buren, Asst. Director, Internal Communications, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, http://www.erau.edu/, 386-226-6525, [email protected]
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