College of Engineering and Computer Science faculty are leaders in fields such as artificial intelligence (AI), hypersonic travel, energy, next-generation computing hardware and aerospace, fields that are major economic drivers for Florida and that are critical to our state and nation’s future.

Earlier this year, U.S. News & World Report‘s ranked nine of UCF’s other graduate programs among the top 50 on the 2024 Best Graduate Schools list.

This pioneering engineering research by expert UCF faculty prepares students to thrive in their careers, as does UCF’s longstanding relationships with industry partners who are eager to hire talented students. Partners include Electronic Arts, Lockheed Martin, NASA, Northrop Grumman, Siemens, Walt Disney World and Universal Studios.

Collectively, UCF’s cutting-edge, high-impact teaching practices and partnerships have drawn many recognitions, including the latest from U.S. News & World Report’s Best Graduate Schools rankings.

Today, U.S. News & World Report ranks three of UCF’s engineering and computer science graduate programs among the top 50 in the nation. The industrial/manufacturing/systems engineering program is ranked No. 43, aerospace is No. 47 and computer engineering is No. 50. Two other programs — materials engineering and electrical/electronic/communications engineering — ranked just outside the top 50, at No. 52 and No. 53 respectively.

A total of nine engineering and computer science programs rank among the top 50 among the nation’s public universities.

“Our outstanding engineering faculty are conducting impactful research that is advancing our knowledge of space, modeling and simulation, virtual and augmented reality, and many other high-tech fields,” says Michael D. Johnson, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs. “They are innovators and inventors fueling our region’s economy and our society’s quality of life, healthcare, energy and transportation systems, and they excel at preparing our graduates to thrive in their careers.”

Twenty-nine percent of Kennedy Space Center employees and 25% of Lockheed Martin’s Orlando employees earned UCF degrees. Aviation Week Network has named UCF the No. 1 supplier of graduates to the aerospace and defense industry for six consecutive years.

Bringing More Brilliant Minds Together

UCF’s College of Engineering and Computer Science produces 25% of Florida’s engineering and computer science graduates, according to the State ����ֱ�� System. The college’s goal is to educate 25,000 engineering and technology students by increasing capacity by 50%.

One important path to achieving that goal is to expand the college’s faculty. Last year and this year combined, the college has hired 55 new faculty members, including many with expertise in the strategic investment program areas identified by the university, such as AI, energy, next-generation computing hardware, space-aerospace, digital twin and infectious diseases. The new faculty hires will further strengthen the college’s research initiatives and opportunities for students to learn alongside talented faculty in the classroom and in research labs.

Plans for this fall also include one new degree program. The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering will launch a master of science in robotics and autonomous systems program. Students will learn to analyze, design and develop robotics and autonomous systems including self-driving cars, drones, medical robots and even mechanical dogs.

The new faculty and degree program join a host of current UCF engineering and computer science faculty who are conducting groundbreaking research:

• Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Professor Kareem Ahmed received Department of Defense funding that’s establishing UCF as a leader in hypersonics and space propulsion research. Hypersonic propulsion would allow for air travel at speeds of Mach 6 to 17, or more than 4,600 to 13,000 miles per hour, and has applications in commercial and space travel.

• Sudipta Seal, chair of materials science and engineering, and Ozlem Garibay, assistant professor in industrial engineering and management systems, have created an Al-based prediction method that helps develop life-saving medicines and treatments for various diseases with up to 97% accuracy.

• Tarek Elgohary, an associate professor of aerospace engineering, is developing algorithms that will accurately track space objects like asteroids and satellites so they don’t collide with spacecraft. It’s a vital tool given the rapid growth of space junk in cislunar space, which stretches from Earth to just beyond the moon’s orbit.

• Carolina Cruz-Neira, the Agere Chair Professor at the UCF Department of Computer Science and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, is a pioneer in the areas of virtual reality and interactive visualization, having created and deployed a variety of technologies that have become standard tools in industry, government and academia. In a few weeks, she will be inducted into the inaugural Augmented World Expo (AWE) XR Hall of Fame, joining an elite international group of 100 researchers, entrepreneurs, artists and others. Cruz-Neira was one of just 22 researchers selected. “It is not well known that UCF has one of, if not the, largest concentration of VR researchers in the U.S.,” she says. “Of course, the strong reputation of UCF as a leader in modeling and simulation ties very well with the ecosystem.”

In addition, the internationally recognized Collegiate Cyber Defense Club at UCF won first place at the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition in April. The club has been sending student teams around the world to compete against other universities since 2013. In all, UCF cybersecurity teams have earned 87 first place awards — including five NCCDC titles — 29 second-place and 25 third-place awards. The competitions allow UCF students to sharpen their skills before cybersecurity professionals and are hosted by companies from private industry, such as IBM, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Raymond James, Raytheon and several federal agencies.

More than 2,100 competitors from 198 schools participated in events across the country during NCCDC regional events, with the top 10 teams advancing to the national championship.

As one of the nation’s largest collegiate competitions of its kind, this year’s NCCDC tasked competitors with the scenario of managing, operating and defending the network infrastructure of a human resource outsourcing firm while responding to business tasks, customers, and fending off a group of live Red Team hackers.

“With our successful track record in the National CCDC and other cyber competitions over the years, it’s an undeniable fact that UCF has the best cyber program, best students, and best coaches in the nation,” said Professor Tom Nedorost, head coach of the team.

The competition’s unique focus on operational aspects of managing and protecting a network infrastructure is designed to assess each student’s depth of understanding and operational competency. The NCCDC is more than just a competitive environment though, as hundreds of volunteers work closely with participating competitors throughout the year to help develop their professional networks and provide mentorship.

Through these competitions, students gain skills and real-world experiences that make them highly attractive to potential employers.

It was this specific competition that led Harrison Keating to UCF. As a high school student in St. Augustine, Florida, he enjoyed building websites and began looking at the competitions held at the college level. When he realized that UCF had a track record of winning them, he made sure that his campus visit to UCF included a stop at the Hack@UCF cybersecurity club. He enrolled, and landed a spot as an alternate on the team that he now leads as captain.

“The NCCDC is a two-day event,” Keating said. “At the beginning of day two, we were in third in one category and didn’t place in the other three. At that point, victory didn’t seem to be a possibility, Morale was low, but the team did an amazing job to find the silver lining, persevere and figuring out a way to improve in day two. Going from that position to national champions in a day was an incredible testament to the team’s determination.”

Keating and several of the team members will graduate this week in commencement ceremonies at UCF.

“The scenario we developed for this elite group of students is very realistic,” said Dwayne Williams, Director of the NCCDC and associate director at the CIAS. “The primary challenge this year is securing large amounts of personally identifiable information across different industries and states, but also dealing with a company acquisition while being targeted by bad actors. These unique challenges and hands-on experiences help each of these teams prepare for the real-world scenarios they will face after graduation.”

The team hopes to regain the national title after having won the championship three consecutive years (2014, 2015, 2016) and finishing as runner-up the past three years (2018, 2019, 2020).

In a tune-up competition two weeks ago, UCF finished second at the Maryland Cyber Challenge hosted by the ����ֱ�� of Maryland Global Campus.

The April 23-25 national competition, which is the highest visibility competition for the team each year, had been scheduled to be held in San Antonio, Texas, but the pandemic forced the event to go virtual.

“The pandemic has severely impacted cyber competitions this academic year,” says Tom Nedorost ’02MS, the team’s coach and faculty advisor for the student cybersecurity club, Hack@UCF. “Going into this academic year, I knew six of my eight returning team members would graduate this year. Recruiting talented new students last August was a tremendous challenge considering our campus was locked down.”

Training has been difficult this year since most of it has been conducted remotely.

Training has also been difficult this year since most of it has been conducted remotely, he says. Teams typically compete from one location, but this year in the virtual competitions, team members had to learn to communicate effectively with each other while competing from home and simultaneously working on multiple tasks to detect and defend computer networks from outside threats.

“This led to rule changes which made this year’s competition even more challenging,” Nedorost says.

The eight team members headed to the national competition are: Michael Roberts ’19, a graduate student and team captain from Winter Springs, Florida, who has been on the team five years; twin brother Martin Roberts ’20, a graduate student from Winter Springs; Alexander Cote, co-captain from Monroe, Michigan; Michael Troisi from St. Cloud, Florida; Nelson Torres from Orlando; Kai Garcia from Winter Springs; Aiden Durand from Charleston, South Carolina; and Christopher Fischer from Orlando.

“The team members and I are anxiously looking forward to the time where we’ll be able to compete on location with other schools,” Nedorost says. “I expect UCF will continue to have a highly competitive cyber team well into the future.”

“Each individual competitor needed to possess the knowledge and skills and perform all the work typically spread among a six-member team.”
— Tom Nedorost

Due to the pandemic, this year’s CyberForce competition shifted from an in-person test designed for teams to a virtual challenge designed for individual competitors. More than 450 college students from across the nation were selected to participate in the sixth annual competition, but only 201 students from 36 states earned points in the cybersecurity exercise intended to mimic the energy sector.

This year’s scenario required competitors to secure and report on a fictitious wind energy company in charge of more than 20,000 megawatts of electricity generation that had been experiencing abnormal network activity.

“Each individual competitor needed to possess the knowledge and skills and perform all the work typically spread among a six-member team,” says Associate Lecturer of Computer Science Tom Nedorost, faculty advisor for known as Hack@UCF. “Michael demonstrated both exceptional breadth and depth of skills and knowledge required to configure, secure and defend multiple Linux and Windows servers, networks, firewalls and [industrial control systems] operating turbines of commercial windmills.”

A digital forensics graduate student, Roberts earned a bachelor’s in information technology from UCF in 2019 and is a member of the Hack@UCF team that placed second at last year’s CyberForce competition and first in the 2018 competition. He has also been captain of the teams that placed second in 2018, 2019 and 2020 at the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition as well as the teams that placed first at the Panoply National Competition in 2017 and 2018 and the Leidos Cyber Challenge in 2017.

“I’m just excited to see my hard work pay off and to be recognized by the Department of Energy for getting second place,” says Roberts. “I am glad that there are competitions like this that improve the visibility of the work we do. These competitions are training undergraduate students, so they gain new skills, as well as people like me who are already in the industry, so we can gain additional skills that can be applied on the job.”

In addition to having an active role in Hack@UCF, Roberts has completed internships at Northrop Grumman, IBM and Chick-fil-A, and currently works as an information security engineer at Abbott Laboratories in Orlando.

“I am glad that there are competitions like this that improve the visibility of the work we do.”
— Michael Roberts ’19

“Cybersecurity really has two sides,” Roberts says. “There’s the offensive side where you’re trying to break into a company to test whether they’re secure or not, and then you let them know how they can be improved; and then there’s the defensive side where you secure the company from attacks. I interned at different places to get a variety of experience and to discover what I liked best. For the past year or so, I’ve been working in the healthcare field, and it feels nice to be making some very important healthcare products more secure, especially given this pandemic.”

According to the Center for Cyber Safety and Education, unfilled cybersecurity careers are expected to reach more than 1.8 million by 2022 — a 20% increase in demand since 2015.

The DOE established the CyberForce competition to address this growing need, by raising awareness of energy sector cybersecurity as a career path among budding professionals.

“The American cybersecurity workforce is facing a gap in talent, and this competition is an exciting, engaging part of helping to fill that gap,” says Nick Andersen, principal deputy assistant secretary of the DOE’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response. “Every year, we see incredibly promising students competing in the CyberForce Competition, and this year was no exception.”

“What I saw [at UCF] is a future powerhouse university in the cybersecurity field. I wanted to be a part of realizing it.”
— Yan Solihin, professor of computer science

Not everyone was completely enamored.

Earlier in that same year, Yan Solihin had come to UCF as the director of cybersecurity and privacy, and to lead the university’s cybersecurity cluster. Solihin had dedicated his career to the cyber race — people with good intentions trying to stay two steps ahead of “the other people.” Whenever he saw a new smart device introduced to the marketplace, he saw something else: another potential cyber gap.

“You can set up a computer with antivirus software and a firewall,” says Solihin, “but now a smart refrigerator could be the vulnerable point for an attacker to target.”

And that begins to explain the reason behind Solihin’s decision to leave his position as program director of the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program at the National Science Foundation (NSF).

“I saw a need to ramp up the cybersecurity capabilities in the U.S., specifically the supply of talent,” says Solihin. “The supply has lagged behind the demand. So I asked myself, ‘Where can I achieve this? Where can I contribute to the future workforce in cybersecurity?’”

Solihin had read about UCF’s advancements in cybersecurity research and academia, and its national success in cyberdefense competitions. He also heard of the school’s commitment to invest in cybersecurity research, education, training, talent development, and to expand its collaboration with tech companies. During a visit to determine if this is the place where he could make a difference, he toured Central Florida Research Park and saw defense companies and government entities just around the corner from UCF’s computer science labs and the Institute for Modeling and Simulation. Faculty members told him about graduates, with a variety of degrees, doing cybersecurity work for giants like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Google, Amazon, Instagram, even for UCF.

“What I saw then,” says Solihin, “is a future powerhouse university in the cybersecurity field. I wanted to be a part of realizing it.”

A Cyberdefense Powerhouse

The supply-demand gap that originally grabbed Solihin’s attention is now more vivid than ever. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, more than 112,000 jobs were available for information security analysts in 2019 and the field is forecast to grow 32 percent by 2028.

Cyberdegreesedu.org ranked UCF among the top 30 colleges for cybersecurity programs in the U.S. — above Florida State, Cornell, Clemson, George Washington and Northwestern.

“We’ve made significant advancements just since I’ve been here,” says Solihin. For example:

• Earlier this year, cyberdegreesedu.org ranked UCF among the top 30 colleges for cybersecurity programs in the U.S., above schools such as Florida State, Cornell, Clemson, George Washington and Northwestern.
• In February 2019, UCF opened the new state-of-the-art Lockheed Martin Cyber Innovation Lab.
• Over the past two years the university’s cybersecurity and privacy cluster has secured $10 million in funding for its research. The funding has been awarded from government agencies such as NSF, the Office of Naval Research, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Army’s Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation (PEO STRI), and Cyber Florida, as well as from industry partners such as Intel and Sophos.
• The nine professors in the cybersecurity cluster are now advising 45 Ph.D. students, four master’s degree students and 17 undergraduates, all of them bridging the disciplines of computer science, engineering, business and psychology to come up with real-world answers to cyber dangers. As Solihin says, “We cannot be confined to our individual toolboxes if we’re going to make meaningful advancements in dealing with important societal problems in cybersecurity.”
• Despite no specific bachelor’s degree in cybersecurity, UCF offers a minor in secure computing and networks, a master’s in digital forensics and a graduate certificate in modeling and simulation of behavioral cybersecurity — all three covering the timeliest topics in cybersecurity. And brings in guest lecturers, such as Amit Kapadia, product manager for cyber resiliency and the training chief engineer at PEO STRI, who spoke to students in the Emerging Cyber Issues class on June 30.
• The school recently announced a graduate certificate in cyber risk management while an official master’s degree in cybersecurity moves through the pipeline for approval.
• The presence of defense, business and government entities in Research Park continually opens doors to internships and job placement.

“What we have,” says Solihin, “is a 20-year history of well-trained students going into cybersecurity careers. It’s a success that separates UCF.”

A Top-Ranked Collegiate Cyberdefense Team

Like the cyber field itself, the cybersecurity talent coming out of UCF flew somewhat under the radar through the early 2000s. Then, in the fall of 2012, a student posed a question to Tom Nedorost ’02MS, who was in his first year as a computer science instructor at UCF.

“We have a wealth of highly-skilled students at UCF with a tremendous passion for the good side of cybersecurity.”
— Tom Nedorost ’02MS, faculty advisor for UCF’s collegiate cyberdefense Teams

“The student asked if I’d help form a team to enter a cyber competition,” Nedorost says. The criteria said each school needed eight team members and four alternates. “I told the student he’d need 11 friends just like him, and didn’t think much more of it.”

The student sent out an email about a meeting to gauge interest in the competition. Three days later Nedorost walked into the room with mild hopes of 12 students being there. He was floored to see 86 students waiting to hear more.

“It proved to me,” says Nedorost, “that we have a wealth of highly-skilled students at UCF with a tremendous passion for the good side of cybersecurity.”

The meeting launched what may have been long overdue: a cybersecurity club, called . Just six months after being formed, the 12-student team representing Hack@UCF finished 10th at the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition. A year later, in a field of 180 colleges and universities, the team won the first of its three straight national championships.

Nedorost and Solihin both say UCF’s large pool of students (more than 3,000 computer science undergraduates and as many as 300 members in Hack@UCF) is a factor in UCF’s track record of turning out so much cybersecurity talent. But there’s more to it than numbers. The success of the club is an outgrowth of the collaborative academic culture at UCF — a mutual desire to stay ahead.

“Our mix of specialties and perspectives gives us an important edge,” says Nedorost. “We have honor-roll students majoring in engineering being pushed by students who might barely be above probation status. They’re all incredibly smart. They challenge each other every day, which is a direct reflection of the real cyber world. We need all of them.”

Or, as Solihin has been saying all along: We need more of them. More smart people protecting our smart world.

UCF has appeared at the finals in seven of the last eight years and has placed either first or second in all but one.

“I couldn’t be prouder of this year’s team,” says Tom Nedorost ’02MS, who serves as the team’s coach and faculty advisor the student cybersecurity club, Hack@UCF. “This is an amazing achievement and a testament to the long hours of practice the students put into preparing for this competition. Considering that UCF does not yet offer a cybersecurity degree, the team’s top finish is even more impressive.”

Ten teams from across the United States advance to nationals where a simulated cyberattack is staged against a fictional business network. The teams are scored on their ability to detect and respond to outside threats, keep services such as mail servers and web servers operational, and respond to routine business requests.

Organized by the Center for Infrastructure Assurance and Security (CIAS) at the ����ֱ�� of Texas San Antonio, the competition is usually held in April. However, due to COVID-19, this year’s event was postponed to allow the organizers time to reengineer the competition as a virtual event with student teams all competing remotely from the their homes.

“I am overwhelmed by the amount of effort this year’s team has put into the competition.” — Michael Roberts ’19, team captain

Team captain and digital forensics graduate student Michael Roberts ’19, who has competed for four years, says this year’s remote format presented unique challenges, namely connectivity issues that he says do not occur in the on-site competition. He says maintaining focus despite the ongoing pandemic was also difficult.

“I am overwhelmed by the amount of effort this year’s team has put into the competition,” says Roberts, who earned a bachelor’s degree in information technology in 2019. “I believe that we performed very well despite the circumstances. I applaud the work of CIAS and their team in hosting the competition virtually. I also look forward to the competition returning to a traditional format.”

Nedorost says the team practiced for the competition remotely since spring break after UCF shifted to remote instruction for the remainder of the semester. Students were stationed in Michigan, South Carolina and scattered across Florida.

The field originally began with more than 250 university teams who squared off through regional competitions across the country. From 2013-19, UCF qualified for the national competition by way of the Southeast regional competition, placing first in the region in all but one of the years. In 2020, UCF petitioned to move to the At-Large Region, which is held virtually, due to the registration and travel costs involved in participating in the Southeast regional.

The team won the At-Large Region in March, which secured its berth to the national competition. Virginia won the national competition for the third year in a row.

This year’s squad included 11 students from the : Michael Roberts; information technology majors Martin Roberts, Michael Troisi, Ryan Carnovsky and Julian Gonzaelz; computer science majors Alexander Cote, Burnett Honors Scholars James Simmons and Aiden Durand, Christopher Fischer and Nelson Torres.

UCF won the national championship in three consecutive years (2014, 2015, 2016) and finished runner-up in 2018 and 2019.

The team also won the Department of Energy’s CyberForce National Competition in 2018, and finished runner-up the following year.

“Being a part of this team has been a great honor,” Roberts says. “Many of us have looked forward to participating at the national competition since high school. Being able to work with and then lead an amazing group of students has been something I look forward to every spring.”

Each student on the team has an internship or full-time job offer lined up for the summer. Nedorost says many of the team members are continuing their studies at UCF in the fall and are eligible to compete in next year’s competition.

“I’m very proud of our team’s record and consistency in performance from year to year, and we don’t intend for that to stop next year,” he says.

UCF’s Collegiate Cybersecurity Competition team, known as Hack@UCF, also took 1^st place in its daylong DOE regional matchups at the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago while the simultaneous national event was held at nine other sites around the country involving 105 teams. The ����ֱ�� of Maryland, Baltimore County, was declared the national champion.

At Argonne, UCF defeated 23 other competitors including schools such as the ����ֱ�� of Illinois, Purdue ����ֱ�� and ����ֱ�� of Houston.

UCF’s team is comprised of six College of Engineering and Computer Science�����ٳܻ��Գٲ�:��graduate students and Austin Sturm ’18 and Michael Roberts ’19 ;��computer science majors Andrew Hughes and Alexander Cote; computer engineering major David Maria, and information technology major Martin Roberts. Their coach is Tom Nedorost, associate instructor of computer science.

All the team members also belong to the Collegiate Cyber Defense Club @ UCF, which was formed in 2012 and started competing nationally in 2013.

Hack@UCF won three back-to-back championships in the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition in 2014, 2015 and 2016, and also won 1^st in the Department of Energy CyberForce Competition last year.

Nederost said the team has competed the past three years at Argonne, the host of the tournament, and likes to go head-to-head with other universities there.

“We get to meet teams from many midwestern schools that we don’t typically compete against in other competitions,” he says.

The DOE tournament focuses on the defensive and hardening nature of energy infrastructures. Participating teams competed against each to build networks that can withstand attacks to steal data, deface websites and wipe out critical systems from professionally executed cyberattacks. Their cybersecurity activities were tested in methods, practices, strategy, policy and ethics.

“Our team worked extremely well together,” says Tom Nedorost ’02MS, the team’s coach and an associate instructor of computer science. “They were all very communicative, remained calm and did an absolutely fantastic job.”

During the three-day competition in Orlando, UCF’s team spent 16 hours operating and managing the network of a fictitious agricultural company called Cryovine that specializes in seed storage, plant development and farm-to-table initiatives. The team used their cyber skills to monitor network activity and fend off attacks from professional hackers injected into the competition to steal the personal information of company employees, acquire customer credit card information, and disrupt business activities.

The teams are scored on their ability to detect and respond to outside threats, keep services such as mail servers and web servers operational, and respond to routine business requests. The competition is organized by the Center for Infrastructure Assurance and Security at the ����ֱ�� of Texas San Antonio.

“The professional penetration experts who participated in the competition made a point to tell me how tough our team was,”— Tom Nedorost ’02MS, associate professor and team coach.

“The professional penetration experts who participated in the competition made a point to tell me how tough our team was,” says Nedorost. “I know they were on top of their game for the last two days.”

This is the second consecutive year UCF has placed second in the prestigious competition.

The ����ֱ�� of Virginia, who were also the 2018 champions, took first place. Rochester Institute of Technology came in third.

The field originally began with more than 200 university teams who squared off through regional competitions across the country. UCF won the 2019 Southeast Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition at Kennesaw State ����ֱ�� earlier this month, ousting 32 teams from seven states. The victory earned the team a spot to compete against nine other winning regional teams in this week’s national event.

UCF has won the regional competition six times in the last seven years. In December, the team took first place in the U.S. Department of Energy’s CyberForce National Competition.

UCF’s 14-member team is comprised College of Engineering and Computer Science students: Matthew St. Hubin, Michael Troisi, Charlton Trezevant, Michael Ibeh, Craig Calkins, Aiden Durand, Peter Steffey, Alexander Cote, James Simmons, Martin Roberts, Michael Roberts, Peyton Duncan, David Maria and Collin Johnson.

This was the first time competing at the national level for sophomore computer science major Alex Cote, who said the team performed well under the pressure. “We rely on each other. We need to trust each other to get our respective jobs done,” Cote says.

The team won’t rest on their laurels for long. Five team members head out this weekend for New York where they’ll again fight hackers at a student-run competition at the ����ֱ�� of Buffalo. In the meantime, Cote and other team members will be in Atlanta for cyber training.

“We practice a lot so we end up spending a lot of time together,” says Cote. “It’s almost like a family.”

With 12 of the 14 team members returning to UCF next year, Nedorost envisions more success ahead. “We’re in very good shape to continue our trajectory,” he says. “We’re already looking forward to competing next year.”

The six-member team – all of them under 21 years old – faced teams of professionals from major tech companies including Cisco and Kapersky Lab.

“We were really nervous,” said Robert Tonic, a 20-year-old junior majoring in psychology. “When we learned we won third place, it was absolutely awesome. We were more than ecstatic.”

In addition to Tonic, members of the team are: Matthew St. Hubin, a junior information technology major who is team captain; David Maria, a junior computer engineering major; Andrew Hughes and Noah Al Shihabi, both juniors majoring in computer science; and Ryan Meinke, a sophomore computer engineering major.

They’re all members of the UCF Collegiate Cyber Defense Club, a student organization that focuses on information-security education. The club regularly fields teams that compete in cybersecurity competitions, and were three-time consecutive national champions after winning the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition in 2014, 2015 and 2016.

In August, Hubin’s team competed in the North American Global Cyberlympics for the first time and placed first in North America. That earned them a spot in the world finals, which took place Sept. 27 in The Hague, Netherlands.

The competition included a series of challenges that started with blunt physical security and progressed to cybersecurity expertise.

First, they were given a box containing seemingly random items – a nail, a credit card, a file, a padlock and headphones – and were asked to open the padlock using only items in the box. After some tinkering, they broke open the headphones and pulled out a metal shim they used to pick the lock. Their next task was to determine the number of the credit card, which was not printed on its front. The team pulled it off by using the file to produce fine metal shavings from the nail that were used to reveal details recorded on card’s magnetic stripe.

Only after solving those puzzles were they given a network connection and computer-based challenges, including ferreting out specific text strings hidden within a massive memory dump.

It would seem like a tense competition, especially considering that the UCF team was sleep-deprived after arriving the day before following 21 hours of travel. But they didn’t see it that way.

“We wanted to compete and we wanted to win, but we’re all friends so we were all having fun,” Tonic said. “When we’re having fun we work faster.”

They finished behind a first-place Netherlands team and second-place Russian team.

A GoFundMe account was opened to raise money for the team to travel to the Netherlands. But a donation from Logan Hicks, founder and CEO of the IT engineering company EduArmor, made the trip possible by funding most of the cost.

“Without help from that donor, we definitely would not have been able to travel to this competition, so we are very grateful for that,” Tonic said.

The students are members of UCF’s Collegiate Cyber Defense Club, better known as Hack@UCF. The club has built a national reputation after fielding competitive teams that won three consecutive national championships in the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition in 2014, 2015 and 2016.

Earlier this month, a student team led by Matthew St. Hubin entered the online North American Global Cyberlympics competition, facing a series of challenges including digital forensics, system exploitation, reverse engineering, cryptography and more. It was the first time these students had entered the competition, but they placed in the top 10 worldwide and first in North America, beating a long list of teams including some made up of professionals from top tech companies.

“An academic team winning a competition like this that has teams from big corporations is pretty impressive,” St. Hubin said.

St. Hubin and fellow team members Andrew Hughes, David Maria, Ryan Christopher Meinke, Noah Al-Shihabi and Robert Paul Tonic earned a spot in the world finals that take place Sept. 27 in The Hague in the Netherlands. raise the travel funds to make it to the competition.

“This trip isn’t corporate-sponsored. We’re just college students and it’s a big cost for us,” St. Hubin said. “Every day that goes by the flight tickets increase, so the clock is definitely ticking for us.”