True is honored to support the Tulsa community. Since we opened our doors in 2004, that support has taken many forms from volunteering for community outreach events and work days to donating funds to local causes. In recent years, that support has expanded to include sponsoring and mentoring the University of Tulsa (TU) security and hacking competitive teams. Currently, these include the TU Capture the Flag (CTF) Team and the TU Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) Team. We have been working closely with team members over the past two years, developing and building their skill sets as well as sponsoring events.
CCDC is a competition in which a blue team (representing a security team and in this case is the competing collegiate team) is given an environment or set of servers to manage. The servers represent a mock business and are already pre-configured to meet the needs of that business. The goal is to identify any gaps in the security of the servers, close any ports open unnecessarily, update any out-of-date machines or software packages, identify rogue processes and eliminate them, monitor inbound and outbound traffic, and ultimately, prevent a red team (representing malicious actors or hackers) from gaining access to their environment. All must be done while maintaining business continuity, performing business tasks (injects) and configuring new services at the demand of the CEO.
The TU CCDC Team competed in and won the CCDC 2016 Southwest Regional Competition held at Texas A&M University-San Antonio, which was open to collegiate teams from Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Louisiana and Missouri.
Although TU CCDC Teams placed 3rd in 2011 and 2nd in 2015, this marks the first year that TU has placed 1st in CCDC Southwest and earned the chance to compete in CCDC Nationals, which were also held in San Antonio. The Nationals competitors were the winners of the 2016 regional competitions.
In preparation for their trip to CCDC Nationals, the team decided they needed to work on their image. The results won the red team over. For starters, they had trading cards made that not only reflected their experience, but their interests and personalities as well.
They also decided that being election year, there were plenty of slogans and catch phrases to spoof.
The final standings of the CCDC Nationals placed the TU CCDC team in 4th place for the main competition, which was purely defensive. On the final day, the TU CCDC team took 1st place in the optional "Penopoly": an offensive, penetration testing competition.
TRUE is extremely proud of this team and expects great things from their future endeavors. We intend to continue sponsoring and mentoring the TU CCDC and CTF teams and to build up and support the Tulsa community.