Expert “hackers” challenge students
Tim Rupp and Joe Klemencic, two of Fermilab’s computer security wizards, posed as the bad guys to offer a challenge in the Indiana state-wide college cyber defense competition held at Indiana Tech. With their role-playing, Klemencic and Rupp helped to educate the tech-savvy students about what motivates the enemy.
Sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the competition pits top students in computer science programs against would-be hackers to teach them about business security in a realistic environment. During the two days of the competition, the college teams completed business tasks sent to them by a White Team, representing managers, while fending off attacks from a Red Team, portraying hackers.
At Indiana Tech, teams from IT and Ivy Tech Community College set up simulated business environments in networked classrooms. From another classroom, the Red Team, consisting of Klemencic, Rupp, and the personal computers they’d lugged from home, tried to break into their computers. Because the teams focused most of their energy on preserving their computing infrastructure and resources, the Red Team successfully compromised their systems, says Klemencic. Unbeknownst to the students, they accessed the teams’ web servers and personal data, such as usernames and passwords.
In a debriefing session on the final day of the competition, Klemencic and Rupp disclosed their strategies and tools to the surprised teams. “We had to drive into them that the bad guys aren’t out to ruin their systems,” says Rupp. “It’s money that drives them. Systems can be replaced, but once data is lost, you can’t get it back.”
Rupp participated in the competition last year as a senior on IT’s team. He did several summer internships at Fermilab before graduating and coming to work for the Computing Division in June 2006. Although his team lost the 2006 competition by only a fraction of a point, he’s learned from Joe to keep on top of current hacker technology. “We talk all day long about new exploits that are coming,” he says.
Christine Buckley
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