March 28, 2024
Annapolis, US 49 F

AACC Cyber Forensics Team Wins International Competition

An Anne Arundel Community College cyber forensics team won first place in the community college division and was among the top 10 teams on the leaders’ board of the U.S. Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center (DC3) Digital Forensics Challenge that drew 1,147 teams from all 50 states and 52 countries. The team will receive its award at the Department of Defense Cyber Crime Conference Jan. 22-27 in Atlanta, Ga.

The AACC team of Richard Clark of Glen Burnie, Dina Duncan Haines of Severna Park, London Orcurto of Bowie and Christopher Rollins of Pasadena took first place. A second AACC team of Douglas Hayden of Annapolis, Robert Singleton of Arnold, Jasper Tucker of Annapolis and Carly Wyman of Crownsville took third place.

“AACC works with our community and government partners to make sure our courses track with what is expected of professionals in the cyber industry and then seeks opportunities for our students to experience real-life challenges in the field. It is gratifying to know that our teams were well-prepared and we are so proud to see them excel,” said AACC President Martha A. Smith.

All team members are enrolled in AACC’s “Cyber Forensics” course this fall. None of the members of either team has had prior cyber forensics experience, and they used what they had learned eight weeks into the course and what they discovered doing independent research to find solutions to the challenges. Contestants included teams from government, the military, commercial businesses, civilian groups and educational institutions, from high schools to the graduate level.

The U.S. Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center (DC3) Digital Forensics Challenge is a yearlong competition that begins each December and ends in November. The challenge requires the digital forensics community to create new investigative tools, techniques and methodologies and each year encourages a broad range of individuals, teams and institutions to provide innovative technical solutions to computer forensics examiners in the lab as well as in the field.

The challenge consists of 23 individual scenario-based, progressive exercises. All participants compete and receive scores based on solutions to the same 23 exercises. The exercises are broken down into five levels, the Level 100 Novice, Level 200 Advanced, Level 300 Expert, Level 400 Master which has no known solution and Level 500 Developer where teams must develop tools to complete the exercise.

As the AACC teams entered with only 17 days left before this year’s competition closed, they tackled Level 100, Level 200 and a portion of Level 300, winning over teams from 25 other community colleges. Scoring was based not only on their ability to recover digital evidence, but also on their understanding of legal authority, proper documentation and report-writing techniques.

Dawn Blanche, a cyber instructional specialist who is in her first semester at AACC, taught the class. She credited both teams’ perseverance and determination in achieving such excellent results.

Previous Article

BGE Warns Customers Colder Weather Brings Higher Bills

Next Article

City Alderman’s Home Raided By Annapolis Police Department

You might be interested in …