A team of Drexel students qualified for a regional cybersecurity competition

After just a year of training in cybersecurity defense, the CyberDragons — a team of students from Drexel University — have secured a spot on the Mid-Atlantic Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (MACCDC) happening March 30.

The competition will take place at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. There, the team will compete against teams from seven other higher ed institutions to deploy cyber security tactics and fend off three servers from the attacks of cybersecurity experts (aka hackers).

Colbert Zhu, 20, is a computer science student at Drexel. He founded the team and has been working alongside advisors from Susquehanna International Group (SIG) and Drexel’s School of Engineering to develop the technical chops needed and successfully fend off a system from cyberattacks.

“Working with SIG to bring together a team for the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition is a natural extension of our mission to prepare our students to be leaders in the profession,” said Steven Weber in a statement. He’s the director of Drexel’s Cybersecurity Institute. “Drexel’s partnership with SIG on the CyberDragons team is a great example of industry and universities working together to confront an important issue for our national security and economy: the cybersecurity skills gap.”

Ask Zhu what the team’s strategy for the competition is and he’ll blast some serious lingo at you:

“Firewall is a major key to our strategy,” Zhu said. “We’ll be working to limit network access and set up some segmentation from current servers.”

Get that segmentation, CyberDragons.

One team from the eight competing at MACCDC will move on to the national championship happening in San Antonio, Texas.

“I’m definitely happy because it’s our first year as a club, so it’s pretty amazing to just qualify,” Zhu said.