Brecksville Native Part of Winning Team in National Cyber Defense Competition

The third time's the charm for Rochester Institute of Technology's cyber defense team.

And a Brecksville native was a part of making history for the college.

After being bested in the finals for two years in a row, an RIT team — featuring Brecksville's own Bryan Delaney — took home the first-place trophy for the first time in school history at the 2013 National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition.

Delaney, a networking and system administration graduate student part of the winning team along with seven other students, according to a news release.

In RIT's fourth trip to nationals in six years, the student team beat second-place Dakota State University and third-place Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in the largest college-level cyber defense competition in the United States.

In this year's scenario, students were tasked to take over the IT department of a correctional facility.

According to a news release from RIT, the students’ goals were to:

• Keep network systems and Web services up, such as DNS, https and emails
• Complete business injects, also known as service requests
• Defend their network and systems from attacking security experts, called the Red Team
• Provide customer support to the Orange team, constituted by volunteers pretending to be relatives of inmates inundating the team with various requests

"Superstars don't really help in this type of competition," says Bo Yuan, an associate professor of computing security and coach of the RIT student team, in the news release.

"It requires coordinated effort to distribute workload wisely and evenly, and takes a disciplined approach to share information and complete tasks on time."