"Capturing the Flag" takes on a whole new meaning in cyberspace

	Wilkinson, Cardwell, Kurtchiev and Sagona

Computer Science and Engineering is pleased to announce that they're sending a team, lead by ITS Manager Ronni Wiklinson, to DEFCON 15 in Las Vegas, August 3-5, 2007. Billed as the "Largest Underground Hacking Convention in the World," DEFCON brings together top notch hackers and their "government adversaries" to talk about the stakes in the electronic world -- stakes which are getting higher and higher every day. The conference also involves various competitions.

Last year, CSE sent Ronni Wilkinson and Boris Kurktchiev to attend the conference to get a feel for what DEFCON is all about. Says Wilkinson, "We're very excited about the opportunity to attend DEFCON again this year. This is a great experience for us to learn the latest information in internet security, network loopholes, how hackers think so we can block computer attacks, and generally how to improve our computer systems."

This year Wilkinson is also taking a newly-formed cyber defense team comprised of CSE graduate students Jordan Cardwell, Kurktchiev, and Paul Sagona, as well as SC State ITS employee Marshall Hollis, who -- in addition to attending the seminars -- will be participating in the amateur "Capture the Flag" (aCTF) competition. aCTF originated as way for people to learn and sharpen their skills. According to DC949/Orange County, organizers of aCTF, "Hacking [is] about figuring out how things work and taking them apart and putting them back together to do something different, customizing things to make them do things they were never intended to do, and just generally learning how to beat the system." Wilkinson's team will be competing against 22 other teams from other locations including DC, Illinois, Arizona, New York and California.

"We look forward to our team putting South Carolina's Computer Science and Engineering program on the map by participating in this year's amateur 'Capture the Flag' contest and gaining the know-how to improve our scores every year. If we can learn how a system is vulnerable, we can learn how to secure our systems. Attending and participating at DEFCON will give us knowledge and hands-on experience with what is happening in the areas of computer security so we can both keep our college's computers secure with the latest information, and bring back that knowledge to our college's faculty, staff and students," said Wilkinson.

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More information on DEFCON15 can be found at https://www.defcon.org.

More information on the aCTF competition can be found at http://dc949.org/aCTFIII.

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7/16/07