Wichita State and WSU Tech students recently participated in the National Cyber League (NCL) and NSA Cyber Exercise (NCX) for spring 2022. The students are also members of the WSU Linux Users (WuLug) computer science and engineering club. The students included the following:
- Garrett Wahlstedt, WuLug president and engineering junior
- Declan Dsouza, WuLug treasurer and engineering senior
- Joshua Brenner, engineering junior
- Joseph Sekavec, liberal arts and sciences senior
- Colby Duke, engineering senior
- Cameron Smith, engineering senior
- Phong Vo, engineering senior
- Dallas Stroud, engineering senior
- Nick Ridpath, engineering senior
The group competed against 3,600 teams around the country in jeopardy-style challenges at the NCL. The topics included the following: open-source intelligence, network traffic, log analysis, password cracking, scanning, and reconnaissance, reverse engineering, programming, and web app exploitation. WuLug members have participated in seven competitions in the past.
Some of their top scores include fourth place in open-source intelligence and 36th in cryptography. NCX is designed to be more difficult than the NCL and is an invite-only set of challenges; Garrett said he feels like they’ve done well, especially in the Cyber Combat Exercise which was an attack and defend type. There will be more NCX results available in the future.