Maltego partners with the Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition (CPTC) for the first time to empower the world’s top cybersecurity students. The upcoming CPTC focuses on mimicking the activities performed during a real-world penetration testing engagement conducted by companies, professional services firms, and internal security departments around the world.
Through the Maltego Grants for Education & Research Program, Maltego provides the CPTC Team with its all-in-one cyber investigation tool, which accelerates and simplifies investigations through link analysis and seamlessly uncovers patterns and multiple order data connections.
How the CPTC First Began 🔗︎
The CPTC began small in 2015, in a classroom at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). Now in its ninth season, the competition boasts over 100 schools that compete across eight global regions.
From San Francisco to Dubai, these top cybersecurity students gain real-life experience that will benefit their eventual work environments. Hosted by the RIT, one of the premier institutions in the world for cybersecurity education, training, and research, the CPTC intends to provide opportunities for as many interested teams as possible, within the limits of the space available at each regional event.
More on the 2023 Theme 🔗︎
This year’s theme for the CPTC is an airport with an onsite people mover (monorail). The structure of the competition involves students starting in five U.S. regions, three international regions, and a global at-large category.
Regional hosts for this year’s competition include University of New Haven (CT, USA), Baldwin Wallace University (OH, USA), Tennessee Tech University (TN, USA), Augusta University (GA, USA), Stanford University (CA, USA), Coastline College (CA, USA), Concordia University (QC, CAN), RIT Dubai (UAE) with co-host Princess Sumaya University (Jordan), and remotely Kanazawa Institute of Technology (Japan).
“Now in our 6th year of hosting the CPTC Western Regional at Stanford University, our student team has also competed for the last 7 years,” said Alex Keller, Senior Systems Security Engineer, School of Engineering, Stanford University. As a staff advisor and coach for Stanford Applied Cyber, a student group focused on all aspects of cybersecurity, he adds, “It is a joy to host a competition that provides such an engaging and rewarding experience for the competitors. The premise of CPTC is refreshingly unique – student teams take on the persona of a professional security firm working on behalf of a fictitious client business to conduct a mock penetration test of an authentically complex network infrastructure. Since the early years of CPTC, elements of open-source intelligence (OSINT) have been incorporated into the contest, an aspect largely absent in other collegiate cyber competitions. Just like the real world, OSINT can be a key differentiator when paired with human and infrastructure intelligence to assert a significant advantage in the competition.”
Each of the eight in-person regions accommodates up to ten teams of students, and the at-large category fields dozens of teams.
This competition is different because we attract the most elite cybersecurity students in the world, who are hungry to engage with our competition infrastructure. Each year, we work closely with leading manufacturers and technology companies to create a digital facsimile of a unique critical infrastructure. This year, we are particularly excited to work with Maltego to help create additional realism for this year’s airport infrastructure theme.
M Pelletier, Justin. Global Director, CPTC and Director of the Cyber Range and Training Center in RIT’s Global Cybersecurity Institute.
About the Maltego Grants for Education & Research Program 🔗︎
The mission of the Maltego Grants for Education & Research Program is to bolster students who are driven to change the world. By providing tailored career guidance based on their unique interests, academic fields, and professional objectives, the Program aims to enable students to effectively leverage the ever-advancing digital and technological landscape.
The Program equips students with the necessary skills, training, and qualifications. This ensures that they are prepared to tackle the increasing security risks that have the potential to impede economic development and erode public confidence. Collaborating with educational institutions assists in fulfilling a shared objective of building a more resilient world.
As one of the global partners of CPTC, Maltego will be made available to the world’s top cybersecurity students. Through the Maltego Grants for Education & Research Program, Maltego’s goal is to enable students to effectively leverage the ever-advancing digital and technological landscape. Participating at CPTC will help them gain valuable experience for the students’ career, and we at Maltego are excited to be an integral component of impactful investigations at the CPTC.
With up to 600 of the most talented and motivated cybersecurity students from the top 100 cyber programs, CPTC will see the top 15 teams from across the globe competing in the international finals on January 12th to 15th, 2024. The event is expected to be held in-person at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.
We at Maltego are extremely excited to be part of the CPTC initiative and look forward to collaborating on more avenues with the RIT in the near future.
To know more about the Maltego Grants for Education & Research Program, please visit here. To explore how we can support your university, student cyber club or collegiate cyber competition, reach out to research@maltego.com.
Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Mastodon, and sign up to our email newsletter, so you don’t miss out on updates and news!
Happy investigating!
