Students · April 17, 2026
Student Cyber Defense Team Wins Its First Regional Title Against 15 Schools
Eight students defended a simulated small-town water utility for two days while a red team of industry volunteers tried to take it offline.
A team of eight UW–Porter Falls students won the North Central Collegiate Cyber Defense Invitational last weekend, finishing first among 16 colleges and universities from five states. It is the first regional title for the team, which placed fifth in 2024 and third last year.
The competition hands each team an identical, deliberately badly configured network — this year a fictional small-town water utility, complete with an outdated billing server, a shared administrator password taped (virtually) to a monitor, and an industrial control system for two pumping stations. Teams spend two days hardening the network, keeping services running and answering business requests from a “utility manager,” while a red team of volunteer security professionals attacks every team at once.
Porter’s team kept the pumping stations online for 97 percent of the scored period, the best uptime in the field, and lost points mainly on a billing-system outage early on day one. Judges singled out the team’s incident reports, which are written in plain language for a non-technical manager.
“We practice on the cyber range in Jarvis every Tuesday night, and half of that practice is writing the report afterward. The red team can find a hole in anyone’s network. What wins is noticing fast and explaining it so the boss makes the right call.”
— Renata Okafor, senior, cybersecurity major and team captain
The team trains through the Cybersecurity Club and the cyber range in Jarvis Technology Center, with coaching from Dr. Tomasz Wierzbicki, associate professor in the Department of Cybersecurity & Information Technology. Three of the eight members also work in the student security clinic run by the Institute for Applied Cybersecurity, which does free reviews for local nonprofits.
The win earns the team an invitation to a national invitational in June. Students interested in joining next year’s team can start with the club’s fall capture-the-flag event, which doubles as tryouts.
Contact: Office of University Communications, news@uwporterfalls.edu
Fictional information
UW–Porter Falls is a work of parody. The competition, the team, its captain and coach are invented, and the water utility was fictional even inside the story.