St. Cloud State University recently took first place at the 2025 Minnesota State Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC), held by the Minnesota State IT Center of Excellence.
Ten teams from across Minnesota competed at Alexandria Technical and Community College on Jan. 25.
“They were able to successfully apply what was learned in the classroom to a real-world scenario,” CCDC Advisor Dave Keller said, who is a professor of cybersecurity at SCSU. “Their initiative to extend their learning beyond the classroom’s four walls reflects on the very best of what SCSU stands for.”
In a controlled virtual environment, CCDC competitors assume administrative and protective duties for an existing “commercial” network — typically a small company with over 50 users, seven to 10 servers and standard Internet services such as a web server, mail server and e-commerce site.
Each team begins the competition with an identical set of hardware and software and is scored on their ability to detect and respond to outside threats, maintain the availability of existing services such as mail servers and web servers, respond to business requests such as the addition or removal of additional services and balance security needs against business needs.
Throughout the competition, an automated scoring engine periodically verifies each team’s services’ functionality and availability, and traffic generators feed simulated user traffic into the competition network. A volunteer Red Team (Ethical Hackers) provides the “external threat” of all Internet-based services, which allows the teams to match their defensive skills against live opponents (hackers).
SCSU’s team was captained by Griffin Davies, who was competing in his third CCDC. Other team members included Naima Mumin, Carl Jenson, Dustin Pollreis, Liam Browning, Kenneth Quinn, Colin Robertson and Ryan Stearns.
“Griffin was competing in his third CCDC, and the painstaking preparation he subjected his fellow team members to was the key to victory as the SCSU team managed to survive the Red Team’s final offensive relatively unscathed,” Keller said.
SCSU also had an alternate team who was able to participate but not have their score counted towards the title. They gained valuable experience and performed well, tallying a score that would’ve placed them third overall.
“The faculty and staff of the Department of Computing, Informatics, and Data Science are very proud of our students,” Department Chair Mark Petzold added.
SCSU advances to the Regional CCDC on March 14–15, which will be hosted by Purdue University Northwest in Hammond, Indiana.
