The mission of the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) system is to provide a controlled, competitive environment for institutions with an information assurance or computer security curriculum to assess their student's depth of understanding and operational competency in managing the challenges inherent in protecting a corporate network infrastructure and business information systems.

CCDC competitions ask student teams to assume administrative and protective duties for an existing "commercial" network - typically a small company with 50+ users, 7 to 10 servers, and common Internet services such as a web server, a mail server, and an e-commerce site. Each team begins the competition with an identical set of hardware and software for their fictitious business and teams are scored on their ability to detect and respond to outside threats, maintain availability of existing services such as mail servers and web servers, respond to business requests such as the addition or removal of additional services, and balance security needs against business needs. Throughout the competition an automated scoring engine is used to verify the functionality and availability of each team's services on a periodic basis while traffic generators continuously feed simulated user traffic into the competition network. A volunteer red team provides the "external threat" that all Internet-based services face and allows the teams to match their defensive skills against live opponents.

The Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition (CPTC) provides a vehicle for up and coming cybersecurity student teams to build and hone the skills required to effectively discover, triage, and mitigate critical security vulnerabilities. This competition is unique in offering a simulated environment that mimics real-world networks. The competition focuses on improving the security posture of a fictitious organization and reporting on risks in a manner that is similar to a real professional environment.

Technology - Participants must use their technical knowledge and skills to identify weaknesses in a simulated corporate environment without impacting the operations of simulated business activities.

Communication - Competitors must show their ability to communicate deeply technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Collaboration - To complete the work within the allotted time, teams must work collaboratively, bringing together discrete skills to achieve success.

In support of STEM outreach, MITRE and our partners are hosting the seventh annual national Capture the Flag (CTF) competition. This CTF competition aims to encourage and promote interest in cybersecurity. United States-based High school and undergraduate college students will have the opportunity to compete in cybersecurity challenges to gain real-life experience and win national coverage to make a huge impact on our cyber talent pipelines.

MITRE's eCTF (embedded capture-the-flag) is an embedded security competition that puts participants through the experience of trying to create a secure system and then learning from their mistakes. The main target is a real physical embedded device, which opens the scope of the challenge to include physical/proximal access attacks. The eCTF is a two-phase competition with attack and defense components. In the first phase, competitors design and implement a secure system based on a set of challenge requirements. The second phase involves analyzing and attacking the other teams’ designs.

Learn - Fundamental cyber knowledge by using online resources from MITRE and other publicly available reputable sources.

Understand - Binary exploitation and reversing, web exploitation, computer/network forensics, cryptography, critical infrastructure protection/exploitation and more!

Practice - Using Web resources and training challenges powered by the MITRE Cyber Academy.

Compete - Against students in high school and undergraduate universities across the nation.

Global CyberLympics is an international online cyber security competition, dedicated to finding the top computer network defense teams. This event tests the skills of information assurance professionals in teams of 4 to 6 people in the areas of ethical hacking, computer network defense and computer forensics. Each round serves as an elimination round until only winning teams remain. The top winning teams from every continent get invited to play the game live in person at the world finals.

Global CyberLympics aspires to create an opportunity for ethical hacking to be accepted, practiced and demonstrated without any discrimination, across all geographical boundaries – for the purpose of understanding what it takes to protect and secure critical information and assets. One key initiative for Global CyberLympics is to foster an environment that creates child online protection through education.

The NCL is a defensive and offensive puzzle-based, capture-the-flag style cybersecurity competition. Its virtual training ground helps high school and college students prepare and test themselves against cybersecurity challenges that they will likely face in the workforce. All participants play the games simultaneously during Preseason, Regular Season and Postseason. NCL allows players of all levels to enter. Between easy, medium and hard challenges, students have multiple opportunities to really shine in areas as they excel. The NCL challenges are based on the CompTIA Security+™ and EC-Council Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH)™ performance-based exam objectives and include the following content: Open Source Intelligence, Scanning, Enumeration and Exploitation, Password Cracking, Traffic Analysis, Log Analysis, Wireless Security, Cryptography, and Web Application Security.