CNY Hackathon helps students prepare for work in cybersecurity

UTICA–ROME — The CNY Hackathon, a regional intercollegiate cybersecurity competition, is typically held twice a year at local institutions and has been a collaborative effort between Mohawk Valley Community College (MVCC), Utica College, and SUNY Polytechnic Institute (SUNY Poly).

The spring CNY Hackathon event held April 17 and 18 went to a virtual format amid the coronavirus pandemic. 

The CNY Hackathon brings college students together from all throughout the region, “encouraging continuous learning,” and connecting students with local industry partners, per a news release about the spring event. 

“There are number of attacks that happen to computers and our industry professionals know what those attacks are because they are dealing with them every day in defending computers from attacks all the time. And what they do is they simulate those actual real-world attacks for our students and expect our students to be able to defend against them,” says Jake Mihevc, dean for the School of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) at MVCC and CNY Hackathon co-founder. He spoke with CNYBJ on June 30. 

The event was started as a partnership between MVCC, SUNY Poly (called the SUNY Institute of Technology at the time), and Utica College, according to Mihevc. 

Over the last seven years, the CNY Hackathon has become a major event in the Mohawk Valley, aiming to improve computer science and cybersecurity education while more closely aligning academia with local industry partners. 

Event purpose

When the CNY Hackathon started in 2013, a group of faculty members, students, some industry partners, and some captains from the Air Force Research Lab all came together and recognized that cybersecurity is a “very applied field” and students … “need to be able to hit the ground running as soon as they enter the field,” says Mihevc.

The Hackathon was an attempt to give students a “bridge” between the academic world and the workforce for cybersecurity. It puts them in “real-life scenarios” where they’re defending virtual operating systems from simulated attacks from the red team. The red team is made up of local industry professionals from many of the different consulting and cybersecurity industry partners throughout the Utica–Rome area.

“They create virtual operating systems that have flaws in them and students need to race to lock down those flaws before the red team goes in and takes them down,” says Mihevc.

Event sponsors were able to meet with students online and provide guidance, advice and information on how to submit résumés and apply for positions. The support of industry partners allowed the CNY Hackathon community to stay together for the spring event in an online venue. 

The event sponsors include: Griffiss Institute, Air Force STEM, Adeptus Cyber Solutions of Rome, Assured Information Security (AIS) of Rome, Quanterion Solutions Incorporated of Utica, National Grid (NYSE: NGG), PAR Government of Rome, NYCM Insurance, North Point Defense of Rome, and Leet Cyber Security of Albany. 

AIS has been a long-time supporter of the event, not only as a sponsor, but by providing volunteers to challenge the participants, per the news release. AIS employees volunteer for the event, as many of them learned about AIS through participating in the CNY Hackathon, the firm said. 

For example, Brodie Davis is a software engineer whose path to AIS started while in college at SUNY Polytechnic Institute. 

He participated in the CNY Hackathon while in school and was approached by two AIS employees at the event about pursuing an internship. He began as an intern at AIS the following summer and was hired full-time before he graduated college. 

Davis is still actively involved with community events like the CNY Hackathon, and now represents AIS every year. 

“Interacting with the local cyber community taught me the skills I needed to be successful,” said Davis. “It was through this hackathon that I was able to apply my knowledge and advance my skillset into a career.”

Mihevc says the students who participated in the spring virtual event handled it very well, but he admitted the “in-person element” of interactions with students and industry professional was missing. It is something they hope to recapture during the fall event during the first weekend in November.

“We [who] run the event have been working toward running the event virtually over the last few years. We receive funding from the National Security Agency that has helped us further develop the event. We’re very likely to be running the CNY Hackathon in the future in a nationwide capacity for the National Security Agency,” says Mihevc.

About hacking

Hacking is not a “derogatory term,” according to Mihevc. 

“When we talk about the bad actors, we refer to them as malicious hackers,” he adds. 

The other terms that industry professional use are white-hat and black-hat hackers. White-hat hackers are the good guys and black-hat hackers are the bad guys, he noted.

Mihevc called hacking “very general term,” and defines it as learning how to adapt a program beyond its original scope. 

“How to take something that was built to do something one way and people that have hacking skills can take that and make it do something slightly different than it was designed to do and something that maybe people aren’t expecting,” he says. 

Malicious hackers, he says, understand how software and hardware work and they go in and exploit the weaknesses. At the same time, hackers with good intentions will see a piece of software that isn’t working as well as it possibly could and they adapt it in a way that “makes it more secure,” says Mihevc.