The Southeast Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition was a lot of fun! I had a great team on my hands that not only made the 16 hours of competition time manageable, but also made the trip, mornings, and nights a blast as well. We did not place, although I felt that we did an excellent job of defending our network against the Red Team. The competition was also about the business and systems administration side of things, however, and the focus on this was much higher than we had expected, having not attended the previous year. We weren’t as prepared in those areas as we were more concerned with security (our area of interest anyway).
It’s fine with me, though, as I didn’t mind not getting 1st through 3rd, so long as we didn’t get completely owned! I have a reputation to consider 
. We had a lot of fun with it, and I think everyone we brought with us learned something new, often not even as part of the competition, but from our extensive discussions on the way up there and back.
UNC did a wonderful job of putting on the competition and it amazed us how much preparation went into putting it together. Everything went fairly close to schedule, and the judges had mountains of correspondence with the teams to sift through to make their decisions. All of the room judges and couriers were incredibly friendly, and the Red Team played the role of a proper villain and made a great presentation at the end.
The nights were fun, piled up in a hotel room doing last-minute research, preparations, and discussion. The last night there, we went and saw “300″ and it is every bit as amazing as everyone has stated.
Now that I’m back and getting rested up, I’ll be posting content again on a regular basis starting tomorrow!
Glad you guys had a good time.