Palmetto
Cyber Defense Competition

The event this year will be held at Trident Technical College in North Charleston

A special thanks to our 2024 Title Sponsor: CACI !!!

About The Event
 

About The Event

PCDC 2024 will be held on April 13-15, 2024. Ten teams will be invited to compete on each day of the event with high schools competing on Saturday, colleges on Sunday and the pros on Monday. CyberPatriot will be used as the high school qualifier and the Southeast Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition for the collegiate qualifier.

Scenario - Securing Palmetto Co-Op Doctors Clinic: A Race Against Time

As dawn breaks over the quaint town of Palmetto, the Palmetto Co-Op Doctors Clinic bustles with activity. However, behind the scenes, a crisis is unfolding. The clinic is expanding from a single location to ten, marking a new chapter in its history. But the transition is marred by chaos as the clinic's IT contractor has been dismissed for gross negligence.

Enter the Blue Team, a group of seasoned IT professionals tasked with salvaging the clinic's digital infrastructure. Their mission: to secure the medical records, charting systems, reservations, email services, and website, all left vulnerable and misconfigured by the previous contractor.

The Blue Team, led by cybersecurity expert Dr. Motoko Kusanagi, wastes no time. They descend upon the clinic armed with laptops, cables, and determination. Their first order of business is to conduct a thorough assessment of the existing systems.

Inside the clinic's server room, the Blue Team discovers a labyrinth of outdated software, unpatched servers, and misconfigured databases. It's a hacker's paradise, ripe for exploitation. Patient information, sensitive medical records, and financial data hang in the balance. With the clock ticking Dr. Kusanagi sends specialized units to each site to remediate the myriad of issues that have been discovered… and to find those that haven’t!

How will the teams secure these networks while maintaining system availability? What threats lurk around the corner ready to pounce? Have the networks already been enumerated? Has a system been compromised? In a world of threat-actors the possibilities are endless. Hacktivists are breaching billing systems daily in their fight to establish free public healthcare. Cyber gangs have made over 94 million dollars this year utilizing ransomware attacks and aren’t slowing down. The popular tv show Mr. Robot recently released new content resulting in a spike of script kiddie activity worldwide.

The battle is far from over. In the ever-evolving landscape of cyber warfare, the Blue Team must remain ever-vigilant, standing as guardians of the clinic's digital domain. For in the realm of healthcare, where lives hang in the balance, the price of failure is too great to bear.

We once again will be hosting the Southeast Region Collegiate on 13 April 2024: HackWarz®.

The High School Teams that will be competing in 2024 are: AAST, Academic Magnet, Ashley Ridge, Cane Bay, Clover, Hanahan, Homeschool STEM, Military Magnet, South Aiken, and Swofford

Collegiate teams competing are: Charleston Southern University, Citadel, Clemson, ECPI, Horry Georgetown Technical College, South Carolina State University, Trident Technical College, University of North Carolina Wilmington, University of South Carolina, US Naval Academy

The Professional Teams that participated in 2023 were: BAE, Dominion Energy, ECS GDIT, SAIC, SRC

 

Overview

Promoting cyber security education and awareness

Speaker 1

PCDC is an event for the promotion of Cyber Security education and awareness. Competition energizes local high schools and colleges to develop invigorating and focused curriculum for the technical needed in today’s fast-paced and challenging cyber environment. A brochure for the event is posted in the Documents Section

Competition is an all-day event followed by awards presentations and a networking opportunity where representatives of local technology companies and NIWC Leadership. Each day brings a new set of competitors to the field allowing South Carolina high schools, regional colleges, and cyber security professionals to go head-to-head. The schedule is posted in the Documents Section

Each 6-member team must work together as a real company would to defend their network from red team attacks while maintaining crucial business services and responding to customer and administrative demands. Winners are the most successful at thwarting the effects of hackers while keeping their businesses online and functioning.

2023 Winners

Congratulations to these winning teams!

High School

  1. Swofford Career Center
  2. Home School STEM
  3. Stratford High School

College

  1. ECPI
  2. Clemson
  3. United States Naval Academy
Pro

  1. ECS




Southeast Regional Collegiate HackWarz Champion

  1. The Citadel
  2. US Naval Academy Team 1
  3. US Naval Academy Team 2




Event Venue

 

PCDC 2024 will be held on 13-15 April 2024 and hosted at Trident Technical College in North Charleston in building 920. A map to the venue is posted in the Documents Section. You can download/view the map directly by Clicking Here.

 

THANK YOU to our 2024 sponsors!!!

The competition, awards, scholarships and prizes are made possible through the generous support of many industry and institutional sponsors and over 100 volunteers from NIWC Atlantic and AFCEA, as well as many cyber security industry supporters & volunteers both in South Carolina & throughout the United States. The AFCEA SC Low Country Chapter and NIWC Atlantic wish to recognize the generosity and continuing support of our many Corporate Sponsors who make the 2024 Palmetto Cyber Defense Competition possible.

 
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