CCDC 2021 Recap
[Transcript Below]
My name is Kerry Augustine, President of the Canadian Cyber Defence Challenge(CCDC).
CCDC program develops Students' awareness and understanding of cybersecurity fundamentals. What differentiates this event from other online competitive challenges is that we collaborate with education and industry.
For this year we collaborated with reboot communications as part of this Vancouver International Privacy and Security Summit(VIPSS)
In past years we staged our event in a physical room where we hosted the students and industry professionals. Given our current circumstances, we had to convert to a completely virtually hosted challenge. This was a major first for us and like many other organizations became our inflexion point. We are now positioning down a new path that will become the foundation for our future and we are very excited by it.
Our challenge places students in a simulated, technical, network environment that is set with risks and vulnerabilities. The students work in teams of three or four against the clock. Points are awarded to teams that successfully discover and mitigate the risks.
In addition to the technical challenge, the students are presented with a scenario that requires them to use their business forensic skills to solve the challenge and link the clues in the story with the evidence gathered from the system. This year the story was staged in film with industry professionals. The scene was a fictitious hotel whose systems were attacked and the organization's data assets held for ransom.
Due to the virtual setup, our program challenge was to find a way to give you a glimpse of what was going on with the students and the event. Our team came up with the CCDC News Desk with news anchors to provide highlights of the challenging activities throughout the reports, interviews, and breaking news flashes, using the business theme as our script. It proved to be effective as we received a lot of positive feedback.
If you were able to catch our updates, I hope you enjoyed it.
As for the cyber challenge, the students were busy and engaged. They competed for 10 hours and then worked on their reports and presentations which had to be submitted, and ready for a panel of judges the next day. The top eight high school teams and all six post-secondary teams presented their findings and recommendations. This is a unique feature of our program offering feedback and emphasizing learning moments to the students. Our program is about building awareness with the students on the principles and fundamentals of cybersecurity. As we can all appreciate cybersecurity is everyone's business.
I have to say, of all the events we've staged, this year's event was the most fun. It involves so many industry professionals from a variety of different technologies and business specialities coming together for a single purpose: to grow our next generation of cybersecurity leaders.
We want to thank our sponsors. Without their support, this event would not be possible. Along with the sponsors I would like to say a special thank you to the team from reboot communications who hosted the VIPSS event. They were terrific to work with and embraced our program with open arms. We want to thank the volunteers who include the coaches assigned to all 33 registered teams. Finally, I want to thank the core base of dedicated professionals who make up the CCDC. You know who you are. You make this possible year after year and it is an honour and a privilege to be part of this team.
As we wind down our challenge our team is already thinking ahead. There are many positive takeaways and lessons learned from this year's event. We plan to take all of that with us as we build forward. Stay tuned for our previews of program and challenge event activities for 2022 coming this fall
We look forward to seeing you again!