Maryland Cyber Challenge and Conference

I think we all remember this scene from “The Social Network”. Mark Zuckerberg promises a job to the first person that can hack one of their target mainframes. Turns out this was a factual event that Mark wrote about in his blog that night. Well, Facebook won’t be offering up jobs in Baltimore necessarily but hacking – just like from the scene in the movie – will be taking place in Baltimore next weekend!
The Maryland Cyber Challenge and Conference (MDC3 for short) is happening next Friday and Saturday, October 21st and 22nd, at the Baltimore Convention Center in Downtown Baltimore and we’ve got a handful of free tickets to give away at the bottom of this article.
In an effort to raise even more national awareness of Maryland’s lead in the cybersecurity front, a handful of organizations have created this event by combining an educational conference with a thrilling competition. MDC3 is designed to promote Maryland’s exciting world of cybersecurity career and scholastic opportunities to students and professionals alike. It’s a demonstration of our state’s commitment to advancing Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education and to building a more capable and committed cybersecurity workforce.

Cyber Challenge

The highlight of the weekend is the Maryland Cyber Challenge. It’s the first competition of its kind to bring together high school, college and professional teams under one roof in a thrilling cybersecurity match-up! Teams of six will battle it out for incredible prizes, including an astounding pool of scholarships totaling $84,000 funded by NSA, paid summer internships, and automatic full-time job opportunities for the winners.

Conference

Alongside the cyber challenge will be one heck of a cyber conference. Some of the industry’s most renowned government, business and academic thought leaders will be giving talks, including:

• Chris Inglis, NSA Deputy Director
• Freeman Hrabowski, UMBC President
• Dr. Ernest McDuffie, National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education Director
• Larry Clinton, Internet Security Alliance President
• Ira Winkler, Author of “Spies Among Us”
• Jay Bavisi, EC-Council Founder/CEO

Schedule & (FREE) Tickets

You can view the schedule on the MDC3 website and see all the different panels and topics that will be discussed over the course of the weekend.
We’re giving away (6) Two-day tickets (valued at $150 each) to our readers. To enter yourself in the drawing, you must share this article using the ‘Tweet’ button at the top or bottom of the site *and/or* leave a comment below about why you want to go to the event. If you do both, you double your chances of getting picked. We’ll announce the winners of the tickets on Wed, Oct 19th at 1pm using Random.org’s random generator.
If you didn’t win a ticket or just don’t want to wait, you can register online here.