Students spend weekend as cyber sleuths, trace fictional attack
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A large-scale cyberattack targeted a water company with aims at disrupting service to thousands of customers. What was the entry and extent of the attack? Who was behind the attack and what was its purpose?
These are problems nine teams of students from Auburn University, Alabama State University, Tuskegee University, Alabama A&M University and Columbia High School were tasked with solving at Tracer FIRE AL’23, a cyber incident response workshop & competition held April 14-16 at two sites in Alabama, one on the campus of Auburn University and the other on the campus of Alabama A&M University in Huntsville.
The Tracer FIRE educational program is developed and run by Sandia National Laboratories for the purpose of training university students in cyber incident response. Sandia develops the threat scenarios which resemble real-world attacks, and then the students at the participating universities practice investigating the scenarios with coaching by staff from Sandia’s Research and Engineering Cyber Operations and Intelligence Lab, or RECOIL. The Auburn site was hosted by the Auburn Cyber Research Center and the Auburn University Ethical Hacking Club.
Submitted by: Joe McAdory
