A group of students from Iowa State University has won $25,000 in a cyber analysis competition that Lockheed Martin sponsored with Temple University’s Institute for Business and Information Technology.
The National Cyber Analyst Challenge seeks to improve threat identification and cyber analysis skills of the future cyber workforce and encourage students to pursue cybersecurity-related careers, Lockheed said Tuesday.
“Cybersecurity analysts represent a critical skills need for most organizations and these Iowa State students showed great promise through their hands-on teamwork to solve real-world challenges and progress through the competition,†said Chris Kearns, vice president of enterprise information technology solutions at Lockheed.
“The lessons learned from the challenge will enable us to better support the academic community’s cyber curriculums,†Kearns added.
Lockheed and Temple University announced the contest in June.
Under the three-phase contest, each student team had to analyze a cyber case, undergo training and then go through a real-time practical test in the final phase.
Jim Connelly, chief information security officer at Lockheed, and Maj. Richard Cruz from the Defense Information Systems Agency attended the final event held at the company’s global vision center in Virginia in October.
Iowa State students competed against teams from eight universities and were selected based on technical proficiency, communication and judgment.
Other schools that qualified to the contest’s second phase in September include:
- Carnegie Mellon University
- Howard University
- Penn State University
- Temple University
- University of Alabama Huntsville
- University of Arizona
- University of Central Florida
- University of New Hampshire