How to Win CCDC

This is a collection of articles that I am writing to assist with teams’ success in the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition. Note this is a live article which will be periodically updated with links to sub-articles as I continue to update and expand training and concepts for the competition. Secondly, the title is a little bit of a misnomer. While I am focusing the content around CCDC specifically, a lot of the content will be applicable outside the competition and well into your career.

Who are you?

Well, some of that is answered on the bio page, but here are some notes about me regarding the competition. I was a participant in the 2019 and 2020 competition seasons, on the winning team for Minnesota both years. We then went to the Midwest Regional Competition getting our asses handed to us in 2019, and finished middle of the pack in 2020. If you want a little more information, look here and here for that. I graduated in December 2020 with a Bachelor of Science in Cybersecurity, and took a few years off the competition to take care of some home and early career stuff, before returning to the Minnesota State Competition in 2023 as a Red Team member. In 2024, I took over the Red Team Lead position for Minnesota as the previous Lead wanted to spend more time on other responsibilities. In my day job I work in coordinating 3rd party engagements for my employer.

Why are you doing this?

This is simple. CCDC is the bedrock that my career stands on. I learned far more practicing for, and participating in CCDC than I ever did in a university classroom. I love the competition! It's stressful and the fires of hell that you go through tempers you into a hardened cybersecurity professional before you have even hit your first job out of college. However, the most important part is that its just fun! The friendships I forged in CCDC will likely stick around long into the future. There's just nothing else like it. If your university offers a club which participates, I cannot recommend enough that you join! It was a critical formative experience for me, and I sincerely hope it can be for anyone else reading this too! I want to help how I can, and that's why in addition to all the content here, I encourage any CCDC participants to join the Discord server here!

Get On With It!

Fine, fine. Here is the rough outline of what I am expecting to write about. Repeating what I mentioned earlier, I expect there to be changes and updates to this page as time goes on, so consider it a living document. I will of course, keep a changelog at the bottom of the page.

• Competition Overview
• Team Dynamics
• Injects
• Red Team
  • Competent Incident Reporting
• Practice Strategies
  • This will be expanded upon, just not sure on specifics yet.

Shout Outs

I need to shout out mubix for his How To Win CCDC presentation for serving as the inspiration and supplying good information for this series of posts.

Changelog

2024-03-29: Initial post

2024-04-29: Added Team Dynamics and Shout Outs section.

2024-05-03: Added Injects section and removed The Ultimate Prize and Resources bullet points.