UMA’s Cybersecurity Competition Team
Cyber Moose is a competitive cybersecurity team, founded in the fall of 2017 at UMA. 
Students from any level in cybersecurity and any degree program may participate. Through competitions, team members seek to compete nationwide and work together to improve their knowledge and skills. Team members challenge themselves in defensive and offensive puzzle-based, capture-the-flag style competitions, which are closer to workplace experience than that of formal education by stressing application over theory.
Participation in competitions provide hands-on experience with real-world scenarios that will be helpful in becoming well-trained experts and improving individual skills sets.
Why Should You Join Cyber Moose?
- Learn New Skills
- Test Yourself
- Add To Your Resume
UMA fosters student development and assessment by encouraging participation in competitions and cyber defense exercises.
Competitions & Exercises:
- Designed to sharpen skills by testing the ability of students to build, secure, and defend networks from cyber attacks
- Reinforce classroom instruction
- Build experience needed to secure and defend real-world networks
- Expose participants to advanced technologies and cyber attack techniques
- Raise awareness among future cyber specialists about information assurance challenges
Training Schedule:
Training is held via Zoom during fall and spring semester. Schedule to be announced via UMA Communications. Information can also be found on our Brightspace page within the Cybersecurity Program Student Area.
Competition:
The Cyber Moose participates in the National Cyber League, an online cyber competition that tests students on different areas of cybersecurity. The NCL was founded in May 2011 to provide an ongoing virtual training ground for individuals to develop and validate cybersecurity knowledge and skills using content aligned with individual and team games – which is scalable across many industry certifications, curricula, job roles, and verticals.
Competencies:
The NCL competitions measure player’s game performance, and how they ranked compared to others, and produce individualized Scouting Reports which measure strengths and weaknesses amongst various cybersecurity learning objectives and industry-recognized competencies such as:
- Open Source Intelligence – How well can you Google?
Questions where all answers can be found through open data and tools. - Cryptography – Using tools to decipher encrypted messages or flags.
- Password Cracking – Using tools and wordlists to crack passwords.
- Log Analysis – Analyzing data logs to find what hackers were doing.
- Web Application Exploitation – Finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in web applications.
- Enumeration & Exploitation – Reverse hacking.
Taking a hackers source code and looking through it to find how it works.
Schedule:
The NCL competition runs twice a year, during fall and spring semester. Each semester is separated into two seasons.
- During the regular-season, players participate from all over the country on an individual basis.
- During the post-season, players participate from all over the country as a team.
For More Information:
Please email us at CyberMoose@maine.edu