Student Competitions

Iowa State U Wins National Cyber Analyst Challenge

• By Michael Hart
• 11/11/15

A team of students from Iowa State University has won the National Cyber Analyst Challenge, a contest designed to demonstrate college students' strategic skills involving analysis and threat identification.

The Iowa State team won the competition after a three-phase process that culminated with a real-time practical challenge held at sponsor Lockheed Martin's Global Vision Center in Crystal City, VA. That followed a three-month competition that started with dozens of college teams analyzing a single cyber case. Nine teams moved on to the second phase in which they received training from industry experts.

"Cyber security analysts represent a critical skills need for most organizations and these Iowa State students showed great promise through their hands-on teamwork to solve real-world challenges and progress through the competition," said Chris Kearns, Lockheed Martin vice president of enterprise IT solutions. "The lessons learned from the challenge will enable us to better support the academic community's cyber curriculums."

The Iowa state team received the winning prize of $25,000 while others received between $7,500 and $15,000 to support student, faculty and curriculum development.

Temple University's Institute for Business and Information was another sponsor of the challenge.

Other teams that were finalists in the competition represented Carnegie Mellon University, Howard University, Pennsylvania State University, Temple University, University of Alabama Huntsville, University of Arizona, University of Central Florida and University of New Hampshire.

Speakers during the final event included Major Richard Cruz of the Defense Information Systems Agency and Jim Connelly, chief information security officer at Lockheed Martin.